MATERIAL POETRY

The House of Electronic Arts (HEK) and the Synthesis Gallery invite you to the exhibition "MATERIAL POETRY", which will be on display on the HEK's virtual platform from 3 October. Curated by Giorgio Vitale, the exhibition explores contemporary poetry in new media. Five artists - Ana María Caballero, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Eduardo Kac, Franziska Ostermann and Sasha Stiles - present their unique poetic and artistic approaches.

The exhibition explores intimacy, identity and the self and offers critical reflections on these themes through various media. Since the 1990s, technological advances have characterised the evolution of poetry, which has moved away from the printed page and evolved into a more dynamic, interactive and inclusive art form. With the incorporation of multimedia, hypertext, video, the internet, emerging technologies such as blockchain and the role of performance, poetry has undergone a profound transformation in the digital age.

"MATERIAL POETRY" builds a bridge between analogue and digital worlds and embeds poetry in various artistic media so that it steps out of the ordinary. The exhibition breaks up the linearity of text and creates a space in which the poetic can be experienced in the digital realm. The artists translate life into visual language, connect text with the viewer's consciousness and revive the lived rhythms and social textures of certain times and spaces. In doing so, they enable an intimate experience of another's voice, words and body. Each work in the exhibition shows a new facet of this transformation.

In "Paperwork", Ana María Caballero thematises the materiality of poetry and its role in the transmission of memories. She performs in cities such as Los Angeles, Bogotá and Valencia and collects the audience's reactions to her poems in order to create digital paper sculptures. These sculptures take up architectural elements of the cities and merge the personal with the public by transferring poetry as a message and medium into a new, digital form.

In Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's "THE OCEAN REMEMBERED YOUR BODY", players navigate through a text-based video game that explores identity and memory. The ocean serves as both a metaphor and a physical space that references the artist's personal history and honours the narratives of marginalised bodies. Inspired by early text-based adventure games, the work asks players to use their imagination to recreate the world based on their own experiences and memories.

In "Letter", Eduardo Kac draws the viewer into an immersive reading experience by presenting a poem in the form of two spiralling cones of text. Originally designed as a VR experience, the work allows the text to be rotated and navigated in a three-dimensional space. By referencing moments of birth and death in the poet's family, Kac amplifies the poem's emotional impact through its dynamic form. "Letter" explores the spatial possibilities of language and is shown here in its video version, which is reminiscent of its original interactive form.

In "Can you hear me?", Franziska Ostermann stages a virtual Zoom call between different versions of herself. The fragmented conversations, interspersed with questions such as "Can you hear me?", visualise the difficulties of authentic connections in digital space. The work highlights the alienation and separation created by the technology that makes the meeting possible, as the different selves attempt to connect but never truly match.

In "Cursive Binary: Portrait of the Poet (Variation 1)", Sasha Stiles combines poetry with artificial intelligence and digital language. Together with her AI alter ego, Stiles reinterprets her poem "Portrait of the Poet as a Brief History of Humanity" and transforms it into "Cursive Binary" - a language she has developed for transhumanist communication. The work explores the interface between human and machine and questions the future of authorship and identity in a post-human world.

"MATERIAL POETRY" is more than a collection of artworks - the exhibition opens up an intimate dialogue between language and form, in which poetry becomes a living, breathing artefact: multi-faceted and dynamic. These works break down binary thinking and embrace hybridity, expanding our ability to experience, understand and utilise language on a deep, physical level. They invite us to become part of the ever-evolving story of what it means to be human.

Space architect: Mohsen Hazrati

Flyer design: Klaudyna Koźmińska

Sound: Shervin Saremi

Le Random: The exhibition is generously supported by Le Random.

Artists: Ana María Caballero, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Eduardo Kac, Franziska Ostermann, Sasha Stiles.

Curator: Giorgio Vitale

Co-operation partners: Synthesis Gallery, Le Random