Ilse Garnier: a e i o u / Concrete Experience

Ilse Garnier: a e i o u
a e i o u is the first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany devoted to the artist and poet Ilse Garnier (1927, Kaiserslautern–2020, Amiens). Garnier is among the most eminent exponents of acoustic, visual, and concrete literature and art. The exhibition features works spanning the entire career—lasting more than 50 years—of this pioneering artist. World War II had a profound impact on Ilse Garnier and her husband Pierre, who together sought an experimental visual language that would do justice to a peaceful and supranational society. They developed the concept of spatial poetry (poésie spatiale) as a radical form of expression in which language becomes material, and the text is structured by the space of the surface. Ilse Garnier developed new word figures such as the “curve” or the “parabola,” which she could extend via the page as a passage into an unlimited space. The 1960s saw the revolutionising of traditional art formats and the exploration of outer space. Electroacoustic and concrete music emerged. The work of Ilse and Pierre Garnier is closely linked to these developments, and their poetry became more technical: They created typewritten poems such as the mechanische Gedichte (mechanical poems) and their play with superimpositions, legible and illegible words, light and shadow, or minimal shifts in spacing between elements led to an entirely new dynamisation of text and form. Ilse Garnier was also interested in a polyphonic approach and a continuous alternation between French and German. The exhibition presents central works by Ilse Garnier from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. On view alongside the extensive Fensterbilder (Window pictures), are pioneering works such as Rythmes et Silence (Rhythms and Silence) or Blason du corps féminin (Blazon of the female body). The design for the Puzzle-Alphabet illustrates Garnier’s invitation to open up one’s own poetry, both spatially and physically.

With sincere thanks to Violette Garnier.

Concrete Experience
Annalisa Alloatti, Mirella Bentivoglio, Irma Blank, Betty Danon, Wanda Gołkowska, Lily Greenham, Ana Hatherly, Liliane Lijn, Mira Schendel, Chima Sunada
Concrete Experience presents female artists and poets from the 1960s and 70s who supported the sympoietic relationship between the concrete poem and the experiences of the perceiving body. Opening with Lily Greenham’s music piece Experience, the selected artworks invite us to an intermedial reading of poetic genesis. Blurring the lines between verbal and non-verbal, they are seen as scores for a poetry that is meant to be lived: Betty Danon’s Partitura Asemantica (Asemantic score) and Liliane Lijn’s Neurographs develop autonomous languages that borrow codes from the field of music, technology, and science. Power Game is a deck of cards used in a casino performance through which Lijn invites the participants to examine concepts such as identity, language, and power. Through an experience of writing that seeks not to represent, but simply to be, Irma Blank offers a vibrant poetry of presence. Wanda Gołkowska’s works are gifted with self-reflexivity, and investigate information overproduction and overload. In Mirella Bentivoglio’s De H a E, the letter H becomes the letter E, undergoing material and letter-to-speech transformations in a builder’s workshop — the process becoming poem. Alfabeto estrutural (Structural alphabet) by Ana Hatherly consists of nine form transformations involving abstract signs. It creates a new language system which is indefinitely extensible. Through the practice of Japanese calligraphy, Chima Sunada reconstructs ideograms that embody ambiguous modifications of meaning through the act of writing. Annalisa Alloatti’s Cecità (Blindness) offers a meditative reflection on the poetry and materiality of Braille system, uniting the energy of all senses and the in-between: of meaning, of the visual and of the haptic.

Curated by Alex Balgiu and Anja Casser, initiated with Andrew Hunt.
The exhibitions are part of a series of projects with female artists in concrete poetry.

For information on the accompanying programme please visit: www.badischer-kunstverein.de