Displayed Words – Displayced

Texts by Don Mee Choi, Athena Farrokhzad, Volha Hapeyeva, Quinn Latimer, Rike Scheffler, Yasmine Seale, Hajra Waheed

Exhibition

Launch event: Friday, 13 Jan 2023 6-8 pm Free Entry

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Hajra Waheeds , The Kamal, Displayed Words – Displaced, Klosterruine, Berlin, 2022. Foto: Diana Pfammatter

Who and what defines the space through which words are printed and made legible? How does the perception of written language change from one medium to another?

Klosterruine presents the program Displayed Words – Displaced in collaboration with CCA Berlin and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program during the winter months. As in the previous exhibition series Unfinished Histories, an LED installation will be installed on the inner space of the Klosterruine.

Displayed Words – Displaced is an experimentation in thinking with language, text, and poetics through digital formats. Who and what defines the space through which words are printed and made legible? How does the perception of written language change from one medium to another?

Displayed Words – Displaced plays with the perception of text and its manifold displays; it also poses questions pertaining to contexts within which literature, poetry and language can be perceived or understood. Finally, it asks how literature and language are mediated, and in which language dominant meanings and literary works are conveyed in a ‘multicultural’ city like Berlin. What about languages considered minoritarian that one hears across the city through everyday encounters, such as Turkish, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Ukrainian?

During the winter months, various textual fragments in different languages will be presented through a digital panel display installed in Berlin’s Klosterruine. Additionally, readings will be staged on-site and at CCA Berlin as a means to introduce the texts’ authors to Berlin audiences. Finally, a digital platform will be developed in order to present the texts simultaneously as they’re being displayed at the Klosterruine, towards establishing a long-term digital literature platform:displayedwords.org

Curator

Fabian Schöneich is the founder and director of CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts. He was curator of Portikus in Frankfurt (2014–18) and worked as an assistant curator at Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art) in Rotterdam. Schöneich is the editor of numerous publications and monographs.

Authors

Volha Hapeyeva, born in Minsk, Belarus (1982), is a poet, author, translator, and holds a PhD in linguistics. She has received numerous prizes and awards for her work. In Germany, she was a fellow of the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung (2009) and a guest author at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (2018), among others. In Austria, she was artist-in-residence at the Internationale Haus der Autoren in Graz in 2013 and artist-in-residence in Vienna in 2014 (KulturKontakt of the Ministry of Culture). In 2019/2020, Volha Hapeyeva was Stadtschreiberin (town clerk) of Graz for one year. 2021/2022 Writer-in-Exile, PEN Center Germany, 2022 – DAAD Fellow.

Hajra Waheed’s (b. 1980) multidisciplinary practice ranges from painting and drawing to video, sound, sculpture and installation. Characterized by a distinct visual language and unique poetic approach, her works use the ordinary as a means to convey the profound, and landscape as a medium to transpose human struggle and a radical politics of resistance and resilience. Recent and upcoming exhibitions worldwide include: Sharjah Biennial 15, UAE (2023); State of Concept, Athens (2023); CAM St. Louis, Missouri (2023); Kamel Lazaar Foundation/B7L9 Art Station, Tunis (2023); Relations: Diaspora & Painting, PHI Foundation, Montréal; Hum, Portikus, Frankfurt (2020); Globale Resistance, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Lahore Biennial 02, Pakistan (2020); Pushing Paper: Contemporary Drawing from 1970 to Now, British Museum, London (2019); Hold Everything Dear, The Power Plant, Toronto (2019); 57th Venice Biennale, VIVA ARTE VIVA, Venice (2017). She currently lives and works in Montréal.

Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian writer and translator. Her essays, poetry, visual art, and translations from Arabic and French have appeared widely. She is the author, with Robin Moger, of Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi, out now with Tenement Press. Her translations include The Annotated Arabian Nights, published by W. W. Norton. She lives in Paris, where she is currently a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Quinn Latimer is a poet, critic, editor, and occasional curator. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017), Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013), Film as a Form of Writing (2013), and Rumored Animals (2012). Her poems, criticism, and more hybrid writings have appeared in Artforum, The Paris Review, The White Review, and Texte zur Kunst, and her readings, performances, and language-based moving-image works have been featured and exhibited widely. She is the editor or co-editor of numerous books, among them Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology (2021), Simone Forti: The Bear in the Mirror(2019), The documenta 14 Reader (2017), and Pamela Rosenkranz: No Core (2012). Previously, she was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. She is now Head of the MA at Institut Kunst Gender Natur, in Basel. She is curator of SIREN (some poetics), an exhibition on technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, currently on view at Amant, New York.

Don Mee Choi was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020) received the National Book Award for Poetry. She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and Picador Guest Professorship for Literature.

Rike Scheffler (*1985) is a poet, performer and sound artist creating work at the intersection of language and music. Her work varies from poetry and poetical essays for publication in journals and anthologies to readings, concerts and performances (some solo, some with fellow musicians) as well as sonic ecosystems and spacial installations. As a live performer, she uses her voice, loop station, effect pedals and synthesizer, to create immersive realities challenging common perceptions, dark and warm spatial poetry. Scheffler has received various scholarships in Europe and has performed at international music and literature festivals around the globe. Her poetry collection der rest ist resonanz(kookbooks, 2014) won the Orphil Debut Prize for political and avant-garde writing. She often collaborates with fellow artists such as Mette Moestrup and a rawlings, the sound virtuoso Robert Lippok and Ólafur Elíasson’s Institute for Spacial Experiments. Recent work include the three-part poetry intervention Words That Hurt at Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin (2014), the imaginative exhibition Your Exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen (2016) 2 sound performances at the Festival of Future Nows at Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin (2017) the binaural sound installation Becoming Water at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019) and the surround sound video installation Lava. Ritual (2022) as part of the Poesiefestival Berlin’s exhibition AI Ancestors – Making Kin in the Future at the Akademie der Künste Berlin, which she also curated.

Athena Farrokhzad, born 1983 in Tehran, is a Swedish poet, playwright, and translator. She has published four volumes of poetry. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages, including Bleiweiss (Kookbooks, 2019), in Clara Sondermann’s German translation. Between 2021-2022 she was a fellow at Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD. Farrokhzad has translated writers such as Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Marguerite Duras into Swedish and her plays have been staged in Oslo, Istanbul, and Berlin. She lives in Stockholm, where she is the curator of literature at House of Culture.

Supported by Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, project funds from Draussenstadt and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.