Poetry of Evidence – Practitioners of Memory

15.09.2022 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Don Mee Choi, Eugene Ostashevsky

With Don Mee Choi, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Uljana Wolf

How does poetry translate historical evidence of trauma and loss? How does it voice the void of no evidence? What form can it give to the language of objects which were our witnesses?

In 2010, curator Okwui Enwezor created an exhibition as part of the first Berlin Documentary Forum at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, entitled Rules of Evidence. Its aim was to examine notions of testimony and witnessing fundamental to the reception of the documentary form and to the institutional framing of its meaning in contemporary culture. Enwezor invited artists to respond to three documentary non-fiction books: Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull, W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, and Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. One of the works created in response to Enwezor’s question was done by former fellows Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan and is currently on show at the daadgalerie as part of their exhibition No Flag in the Sun. To activate the installation once more, we want to extend the space opened by Enwezor’s vision to include poetry – because „poetry extends the document“, as Muriel Rukeyser famously said in Book of the Dead.

Don Mee Choi, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Uljana Wolf will read and discuss their poetry centering around poetics of memory to ask what different rules of evidence might apply to poetry.

daadgalerie

Conversation in English

Free admission