Launch of the special issue of OEI # 90-91 magazine dedicated to visual and concrete poetry in Yugoslavia from 1968 to 1983: Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology: Concrete and Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia, 1968–1983

Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, 10.11.2021. 18h

 

Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology offers the first English language overview of the history of concrete and visual poetry production in socialist Yugoslavia between 1968 and 1983. In his presentation, Boynik, the guest editor of this special issue of OEI, will discuss the concrete and visual poetry in socialist Yugoslavia as an uneven and combined development, and emphasizes its confrontational and organizational aspects. Among others the publication includes accounts on the early years of OHO formation and its complex theories of words and things; an interview with Rastko Močnik on programmed art and political formalism; militant polemics of Goran Babić; Signalist contradictions; subjective structural devices of Judita Šalgo; zaum experiments of Vojislav Despotov; detective meta-texts of Slavoj Žižek; poetic self-management studies of Vujica Rešin Tucić; a feminist historicisation of Ažin school for experimental poetry; democratisation of visual poetry by Westeast; selections from special issues of the journals Pitanja, Problemi, Ulaznica, Dometi, Delo, Koraci, Vidik, Pegaz, and many other materials translated into English for the first time and presented in one publication.

 

During the event, Magnusson and Grönberg will talk about the history and direction of OEI magazine, and present the latest issue of the magazine (OEI # 92-93) on Lettrist Corpus: The Complete Magazines (1946–2016), guest edited by writer, curator and sound artist Frédéric Acquaviva. This the very first comprehensive publication on Lettrist magazines.

 

OEI (started in 1999) is a Stockholm based magazine for extra-disciplinary spaces and de-disciplinizing moments – experimental forms of thinking, montages between poetry, art, philosophy, film, and documents; critical investigations and mappings, editorial enunciations, non-affirmative writing, new ecologies, and counter-historiographies.

OEI is run by Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg. www.oei.nu

 

Sezgin Boynik is a theoretician and artist based in Helsinki and Prizren, and has published work on numerous topics, including punk, zaum, concrete poetry and the left avant-garde. He is the editor of Rab-Rab Press http://www.rabrab.fi/