Archivio Conz, with Centre Pompidou, is pleased to announce that Jiří Valoch has been awarded the Prix d’Honneur by the Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou 2023 International Prize for Literature. Jiří Valoch was announced as winner of the Prix d’Honneur on September 7, 2023 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France for his lifetime achievement in the multiple diverse forms of living literature and literary creation beyond the book.
Jiří Valoch (1946, Brno, Czechoslovakia, lives in Ludikov, Moravian Kars) is an artist, curator, collector, and major figure of action poetry. Since the late 1960s, he has complemented the medium of typewriting with new forms of expression—sparsely used drawings, artists’ books, and photography. At the beginning of the 1970s, he produced intimate photo-pieces, worked with textual interventions in negative and positive photographic film reels. From 1968-1972 Valoch was a member of the Klub Konkretistů (Concretists’ Club). Among his salient curatorial efforts are the exhibitions of Stanislav Kolíbal, Eva Kmentová, Karel Malich, and Milan Knížák. In 2002 Valoch donated 4,000 works of art from his collection to the National Gallery, and in 2014-2017 he handed over his archive and collection of an estimated 15,000 items to the Moravian Gallery in Brno. The donation to the Moravian Gallery led to the creation of the permanent exhibition ART IS HERE: New Art after 1945, contributing significantly to the establishment of conceptualism and new forms of art in the context of Czech museum and gallery institutions.
Parallel to the Prix d’Honneur, the Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck awards the Prix de l’Année, this year awarded to Charles Pennequin. Pennequin (b. 1965, Cambrai, France) is a central figure in French poetry, known as well for his reading-performances in public spaces. Pennequin also produces drawings and videos and since the 1990s, shows, reads and performs internationally. He also has contributed to a number of poetry magazines (Nioques, Poezi proleter, Facial, Java, Ouste, TXT, among others). Pennequin’s latest book Petite bande, an outstanding, highly praised, reflection on death and writing, was published by P.O.L in May 2023.
Hubertus von Amelunxen, director of Archivio Conz, comments on the jury’s decision, “The Prix Bernard Heidsieck is rewarding the intimate relations between writing, sound, and the image, a long tradition in the world of literature, that has come out of sight and sound. Jiří Valoch and Charles Pennequin, in different generations, share this decisive art of translation. I am very happy for them and the jury is grateful for their art.”
Archivio Conz is honored to collaborate for the second time with the Centre Pompidou on awarding the Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck. Established in 2017, this literary prize is unique for spotlighting literary creation in forms outside of the book such as sound poetry, performance, performed lecture, reading, film-poem, radio creation, and digital literature. Placed under the aegis of the sound poet Bernard Heidsieck (1928-2014), the prize asserts its great singularity, expanding the concept of literature to recognize diverse forms in creation and dissemination that may be traditionally overlooked, rejected, or marginalized by the literary world.
Jury 2023
Jury President: Frédéric Acquaviva, sound artist and composer specializing in 20th century avant-garde literature
Jury members, 2023: Thomas Millroth, writer and art critic; Cia Rinne, poet and artist
Permanent members: Jean-Max Colard (Centre Pompidou); Mica Gherghescu (Bibliothèque Kandinsky-Centre Pompidou); Nathalie Heidsieck (Writer and Daughter of Bernard Heidsieck); Michaël Batalla (Centre international de Poésie de Marseille); Hubertus von Amelunxen (Archivio Conz)
