The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon is an ambitious two-day poetry event taking place in London during Frieze Art Fair week and featuring unique performances from leading poets, writers, artists, philosophers, scholars and musicians.
An international group of major figures will be brought together to perform in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the acclaimed Japanese practice SANAA. The event will include performances of new work, collaborations, discussions and experiments.
There is a long and vivid history of exchange between artists and poets. Guillaume Apollinaire made a literary connection to Cubism with his great work of ‘visual poetry’ Calligrammes: Poems of War and Peace 1913-1916. In the same period, Hugo Ball wrote the Dada Manifesto (1916), a movement in which the poet, essayist and performance artist Tristan Tzara was also closely involved. A decade later, in 1924, André Breton, the proponent of ‘automatic writing’, published La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution).
In the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism was an art movement with strong creative connections with writing and poetry of the time, from the work of poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery to artist Robert Motherwell’s influential essays on the New York School. Later, in the 1960s, the international artistic network Fluxus formed innumerable close links between visual art and the written word.
The Poetry Marathon is the fourth in the series of Marathons staged in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion each year. The Marathon series was conceived by Serpentine Gallery Co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2006. The first in the series, the Interview Marathon in 2006, involved interviews with leading figures in contemporary culture over 24 hours, conducted by Obrist and architect Rem Koolhaas. This was followed by the Experiment Marathon, conceived by Obrist and artist Olafur Eliasson in 2007, which included 50 experiments by speakers across both arts and science, and the Manifesto Marathon in 2008.
The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects. It is held in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA. The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion Commission was conceived by Julia Peyton-Jones, Serpentine Gallery Director and Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes in 2000.
Poetry Marathon Programme
Saturday 17 October 2009
12.30 – 9.00 pm
Julia Peyton-Jones
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Tim Griffin
Tracey Emin
Tacita Dean
Agnès Varda
Kenneth Goldsmith
Holly Pester
Eleanor Bron
Enrique Juncosa/Boulevard Magenta
Michael Glover/The Bow Wow Shop
August Kleinzahler
Sean Landers
Tom McCarthy & Henry Blofeld
John Giorno
Mladen Stilinović
Édouard Glissant*
Jimmie Durham
James Fenton
Nick Laird
Christodoulos Panayiotou
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Maria Mirabal
Dominic Eichler
Barry Schwabsky & Sean Bonney
Eileen Myles
Olivier Garbay & Cerith Wyn Evans
Richard Hell
Keren Cytter & Andrew Kerton
Kenneth G. Bostock, Cibelle &
Pablo León de la Barra
Don Paterson
Charlie Dark
Joan Jonas*
Nancy Spero*
Sara MacKillop
Sunday 18 October 2009
12:00 – 8:00 pm
Julia Peyton-Jones
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Karl Holmqvist
Olivia Plender
Etel Adnan*
Eugen Gomringer*
Susan Hiller & Sue Hubbard
Michael Horovitz
Caroline Bergvall
Gerhard Rühm & Monika Lichtenfeld
Franz West* read by Gerhard Rühm
Liliane Lijn
Alasdair Gray
Jacques Roubaud
Stuart Brisley
Gilbert & George
David Robilliard read by The Robilliards (Leo Burley & Rosemary Turner)
Daljit Nagra
Nathan Cash Davidson
Jonas Mekas* & Edward Eke
Vito Acconci
Geoffrey Hill
Brian Eno & Karl Hyde
Jeremy Reed/Itchy Ear/The Ginger Light
Saul Williams
Philippe Parreno*
Karl Holmqvist
Grace Jones* & Mark van Eyck
