Launch of the special issue of OEI # 90-91 magazine Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology: Concrete and Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia, 1968–1983, guest edited by Sezgin Boynik.
Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb
Friday, 5/11/2021
6 p.m.
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. By focusing on mass-produced examples of concrete poetry, the publication presents these poetic experiments as organically linked to social movements, critical theories, and youth cultural revolutions. 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. It describes, shows and contextualizes all issues of all 119 magazines created between 1946 and 2016 in, or in connection to, Lettrism – this vibrant and dynamic French avant-garde movement whose publishing adventures and efforts have been far too little known.
OEI 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, started in 1999, has published 93 issues. 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 Pres. http://www.rabrab.fi/
