Lecture and guided tour | Sezgin Boynik: Concrete and visual poetry in socialist Yugoslavia and Impure, Democratic, Concrete: The Westeast Project


Friday, 3 March 2023, 6 p.m. Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova + MSUM

Sezgin Boynik’s presentation on the social aspect of concrete and visual poetry.

In his lecture, Boynik will introduce the publication Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology: Concrete and Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia, 1968–1983, which he guest-edited as a special number (# 90–91) of OEI, a magazine based in Stockholm. After the lecture (approx. 45 min.), Boynik will also introduce the Westeast-related installation he curated for the Art at Work exhibition at the MSUM (approx. 20 min.). 

Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology offers the first English-language overview of the history of the production of concrete and visual poetry in socialist Yugoslavia between 1968 and 1983. By focusing on mass-produced examples of concrete poetry, the publication presents these poetic experiments as organically linked to social movements, critical theories, and youth cultural revolutions. In his presentation, Boynik, the guest editor of this special issue of OEI, will discuss the concrete and visual poetry in socialist Yugoslavia as an uneven and combined development, and emphasize its confrontational and organizational aspects.

Among others the publication includes accounts on the early years of OHO formation and its complex theories of words and things; an interview with Rastko Močnik on programmed art and political formalism; militant polemics of Goran Babić; Signalist contradictions; subjective structural devices of Judita Šalgo; zaum experiments of Vojislav Despotov; detective meta-texts of Slavoj Žižek; poetic self-management studies of Vujica Rešin Tucić; a feminist historicization of Ažin school for experimental poetry; democratization of visual poetry by Westeast; selections from special issues of the journals Pitanja, Problemi, Ulaznica, Dometi, Delo, Koraci, Vidik, Pegaz, and many other materials translated into English for the first time and presented in one publication. 




Sezgin Boynik is a writer, editor and publisher based in Helsinki and Prizren, and has published work on numerous topics, including punk, zaum, concrete poetry and the left avant-garde. He is the founder of Rab-Rab Press, and founding member of Pykë-Presje.