The Poetry Event
2019
Sound installation
Text Group Orbita (Artūrs Punte, Vladimirs Svetlovs, Sergejs Timofejevs and Aleksandrs Zapoļs) is an association of poets, photographers, and sound and multimedia artists who have taken part in Latvian cultural life since 1999, making performances and installations, publishing bilingual collections and organising poetry, video, contemporary art and multimedia exhibitions. In 2015, Text Group Orbita took part in the exhibition Ornamentalism, part of the parallel programme of the Venice Biennale, with the installation Two Sonnets from Laputa, and in 2016 they went on a performance and reading tour in the USA and were also among the participants of the 1st Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art. Text Group Orbita has received the Annual Latvian Literature Award, along with various other awards for book design, and have been twice nominated for the Purvītis Prize.
The Poetry Event is a reading that cannot be reached. The work uses interactive means to ironise art’s hermeticism and sees the subject of outlands as an inaccessible place – it is not a foreign land, separated from ours by a visible or invisible borderline, but rather a place to which the observer has no direct access. The Poetry Event presents poetry (along with contemporary art in general) as one such inaccessible space; its inaccessibility is reflected in the widely-held beliefs that contemporary poetry (and art) “is impossible to understand” and “that artists create for themselves”. While the task of pop culture is to be easily “digestible”, understanding the message and reaching the common space of art requires a degree of effort on the audience’s part that it is not always ready or able to make.
orbita.lv