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Literary evening
UGM | Maribor Art Gallery, Strossmayerjeva 6
Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 18:00
guests: Rod Mengham, Joachim Sartorius and Tomaž Šalamun
special guest: Antonio Paucar

Literary evening with internationally renowned guests is one of the highlights of the opening weekend of exhibition Maribor Project / Rebecca Horn & Guests. Close connection between visual art and literature is a feature, common to all guests of the literary evening at UGM. Excerpts from their own literary works will read professor in modern English literature and curator Rod Mengham, former director of Berlin festival Joachim Sartorius and one of the major representatives of Slovene contemporary poetry Tomaž Šalamun. After literature evening Antonio Paucar will perform with a performance Arm in Arm.

Dr Rod Mengham (1953) is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College. He has written books on Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy and Henry Green, as well as The Descent of Language (1993). He has edited collections of essays on contemporary fiction, violence and avant-garde art, and the fiction of the 1940s. He is also editor of the Equipage series of poetry pamphlets. He has curetted numerous exhibitions, most recently, Jake and Dinos Chapman, In the Realm of the Senseless (Rondo Sztuki, Katowice, 2011). His own poems have been published under the titles Unsung: New and Selected Poems (1996, 2001), Parleys and Skirmishes with photographs by Marc Atkins (2007) and Bell Book (2012).

Dr Joachim Sartorius (1946) served as a diplomat in New York, Istanbul, Prague and Nicosia until 1986. After various positions in the field of international cultural policy he was a Director of the Berlin festivals from 2001 to 2011. He is the member of the German Academy for Language and Literature and holds a professorship at the University of Arts in Berlin. His wide-ranging publishing projects include translations of the collected works of Malcolm Lowry and William Carlos Williams as well as the works by Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, among many others; book collaborations with artists like James Lee Byars, Emilio Vedova and Nan Goldin. His own poetry has been collected in seven volumes and was translated in Arabic, Dutch, English, French, Greek, Hungarian and Spanish. For his translations of contemporary American poetry he received the Scheerbart Prize as well as fellowships by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Tomaž Šalamun (1941) is one of the most influential Slovenian poets. To Slovene poetry he introduced new dimensions in terms of its form, expression, content, and ideas, which brought him extraordinary universal attention and also earned him high notoriety internationally. In his early artistic phase he worked within the neo avant-garde group OHO and this surely contributed to the presence of visual art in his poetry. The meaning and development of his poetry were strongly influenced by his stays and work in USA and Mexico. In Slovenia he published 42 single author books of poetry which have been published as 86 books in 19 different languages. Some of the titles included are Poker (1966), Amerika (1972), Maske (1980), Soy realidad (1985), Črni labod (1997), The blue tower (2007) and the latest Opera Buffa (2011). He was awarded many awards. Among the most important Slovenian prizes he was awarded Preis der Stadt Münster für Europäische Poesie in 2007 and Zlati venec in Struga in 2009. Between the years 1996-1999 he was Slovenian Cultural Attaché in New York. He has been a freelance writer for the most of his life. He is a member of SASA.

Antonio Paucar's performance Arm in Arm is dedicated to Chavela Vargas. He will perform a dance with an unusual dancing partner: upper part of the torso with both arms. The figure is created in the same proportions as artist’s arms and hands. During dance the figure is supported by artist’s arms while following the voice of legendary Chavela Vargas.

FREE ENTRY! YOU ARE KINDLY INVITED!