calendario eventi  :: 

X

17/3/2005

Text Festival

Bury Art Gallery, Museum & Archive, Bury

New Text Festival to Change the Landscape of British Poetry

This Spring, the first major UK festival based on the idea that art can be read as poetry and poetry can be viewed as art launches in venues and sites across Bury, Lancashire. From 18 March to 30 October 2005, Text Festival challenges the boundaries between art and poetry, with a combination of text art and visual poetry. This ground-breaking festival spotlights works by renowned text artists like Lawrence Weiner, Maurizio Nannucci and Shaun Pickard while also celebrating rarely seen but seminal text works by Bob Cobbing, Joseph Kosuth and a host of other international revolutionaries who challenge the insularity and limitation of the mainstream literary scene.

From advertising to road signs, from logos to global branding to digital communications, text forms the visual and linguistic background to everyone’s existence. Poets were once seen as developers of language and ideas, the creators of new ways of thinking and expression, but now they are very often seen as irrelevant. Text Festival celebrates the best and the most innovative in text through a nine-month programme of exhibitions, public art commissions, publications and performances by internationally recognised practitioners and some of the newest talents in the field. The written word or sign consumes and clutters virtually every environment, so Text Festival explores the ways which poets and text artists work with language. It also presents the innovations and devices that can progress the tradition of poetic innovation.

The Festival will open with The Text, a contextual show exploring debates around the overlap in the use of language in contemporary art and the alternative tradition of contemporary poetry. The exhibition challenges the definitions that limit the boundaries by which both art forms are understood.

Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was one of Britain's most extraordinary poets, hugely encouraging and influential. The show, curated by the poet’s widow, Jennifer Cobbing and poet Phil Davenport, spans a lifetime of creative activity, gathering some of his classic poems together with pieces that have never been exhibited before. Cobbing is famous for his use of the photocopier to generate visual pieces that explode the conventions of reading and even the very idea of words. The exhibition includes a number of works never previously shown and a new sound/music work completed just before his death.

Other highlights of the Text Festival feature exhibitions of artists’ books and different alphabets, supported by a programme of workshops, talks and conferences.

The Text Festival has commissioned a number of new works including:

Lawrence Weiner has been commissioned to create WATER MADE IT WET on a bridge over the Manchester Bolton Canal in Radcliffe, as a complement to Bury’s existing Weiner work HORIZON on the banks of the River Irwell. Two other public art works will be sited temporarily as part of the festival – the text A PILE IN THE MIDST OF and another to be confirmed. The Festival will also feature a rare opportunity to see the Vancouver Art Gallery Lawrence Weiner Poster Archive.

A new neon commission has been made by Italy’s leading text artist, Maurizio Nannucci plus there will be an installation of existing pieces from other collections, supported by an exhibition of new works.

Poet Caroline Bergvall has produced a new sound text in Bury Art Gallery expanding on her DVD work animating ampersands.

Live artist Hester Reeve (HRH.the) plans an installation in which the artist will spend nine weeks writing out by hand Heidegger's Being and Time in Bury Art Gallery.

Shaun Pickard has completed his MisIdentification installation in Radcliffe and a major one-person show of his work drawn from his researches in the tropical rainforest.

A catalogue written by Text Festival organiser Tony Trehy will be available in February 2005. It controversially addresses the issues of text and poetry in contemporary poetics practice and international politics.

Funded by Arts Council England and Bury Metropolitan Council

Bury Art Gallery, Museum & Archive
Moss St
Bury

stampa

permanent link