While the Poetry Passage#1 had been focused (after Franco „Bifo“ Berardi) on investigating the poetry’s role as a „hidden resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm to another“, the Poetry Passage#2 explores (after Gilles Deleuze) poetry’s ability to produce sense and it considers language (after Paolo Virno) as a transindividual reality which always presupposes a public exchange. For Italian philosopher and semiologist, the human species, precisely because it is capable of speech, is not composed by separate individuals, but rather remains both the theatre and the audience for any linguistic performance.
Thus, all in all, the Poetry Passage#2 contributes to the National Gallery’s all embrasing investigation of the politics of generosity and a construction of a collective voice in 2016. Staged on the Trade Fair Palace’s grandiose functionalist staircase, it orchestrates the photographic work of Jiří Thýn (1977, Czech Republic), a performative visual poetry of Heinrich Dunst (1955, Austria) and the cinematic consideration of an act of reading by Alejandro Cesarco (1975, Uruguay/USA) who explores the „suddenness of language“ in his most recent work „Allegory, or the Perils of the Present Tense“ (2015).
Additionally, the Poetry Passage#2 includes an exquisite appearance of a dance company „Le gens d’Uterpan“ (France) with a site-specific choreography, addressed towards the audience and taming the space. This is yet another attempt to explore a blurred area between acting (pratteing) and producing (poiesis), reexamining over and over again, Aristotlean Nicomachean Ethics and Wittgensteinian Philosophical Grammar towards the performing artist’s naturalistic virtuosity and the language as a transitional phenomenon.
"What is bureaucratic in these fantastic machines which are peoples and poems? It suffices that we dissipate ourselves a little, that we be able to be at the surface, that we stretch our skin like a drum, in order that the 'great politics' begin. An empty square for neither man nor God; singularities which are neither general nor individual, neither personal nor universal. All of this is traversed by circulations, echoes, and events which produce more sense, more freedom, and more strength than man has ever dreamed of, or God ever conceived. Today's task is to make the empty square circulate and to make pre-individual and non-personal singularities speak - in short, to produce sense". (from Gilles Deleuze, „The Logic of Sense“)
Artists: Jiří Thýn, Heinrich Dunst, Alejandro Cesarco
Curated by Adam Budak
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**Heinrich Dunst, "A B out A sentenCe", performance**
Grand Opening, Trade Fair Palace, 5/2 2016 7:30PM
The performance begins at this point, among other things: there is a difference between the act of speech and the concept of language. Something like potentiality and unattainability. How can this difference be made more effective and visible?
**a.** The aforesaid work shows the formation, or rather the model of the sentence being formed that is composed of words in space (i.e. volume). This happens through the performative act of individual speech. Possibly even in the case of a defect (speech defect).
**b.** This individual sentence formation is related to the industrially-made pink letters, including their volumes. And this is also related to the volume of Rodin’s sculpture.
**c.** A minimal wall text composed of three words mirrors the written aspect.
volume
balzac
object B
This abbreviated text would best be placed next to a capital letter, where the upper two words are crossed out. The work therefore suggests certain significant points and analogies in the space of the museum, which however stand out separated from one another and cannot be reversed back into the totality of perception. A blank space gapes between the production and the presentation of industrially-made letters, and the production and the presentation of the potential sentence.
This passage can be regarded as a certain form of shift between the codes of representation and the concepts in question, e.g. production, volume, word, speech, language, sculpture, body, surface, space, place, perception, talk, etc. The viewer of this act of speech sees something that the speaker is unable to communicate at the moment of speech. The view or the formation of the sentence or volume that is NOW, at the instance of speech, entering up the stairs into the space.
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**Méditation** Grand Opening, Trade Fair Palace, 5/2 2016 7:00PM - 10PM
Méditation is an invitation to come meditate in exhibitions spaces. By accepting the invitation, the participants practice
meditation as a performance piece.
Méditation includes the reading of a score by one of the choreographers, this action will allow those who wish to learn
or prepare themselves for meditation. The participants will then go take position in the exhibition spaces in order to
meditate. The location and duration of the experience are components left freely to each individual. The meditation
takes place in front of the public who is present at the time in the building.
**Franck Apertet will read at regular intervals Méditation’s protocol**
*See more at [**press release**](https://ngprague.cz/userfiles/filemanager/files/tz_220_years_of_the_national_gallery_in_prague.pdf).*
