Agnieszka Taborska, photo: Helena Giersz
New York’s 9th annual New Literature from Europe Festival focuses on the relationship between literature and other arts, offering American readers a unique opportunity to encounter European writers from seven countries, with readings and discussion of their work in both English and the original languages. Agnieszka Taborska is presenting her forthcoming work entitled The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks, and Polish-American Marek Bartelik moderates the 2012 Festival
Running under the title Artistic Fictions / Fictional Artists, this year’s edition of the festival takes up the relationship between literature and visual art. The 2012 New Literature from Europe Festival asks why European writers are writing about art, about artists, and about the art world today, and what this art about other arts reveals about the creative process. Why are contemporary novelists using painting or music as a link between present and past, or even as a means for conjuring the dead? What can be revealed when one art form is refracted through another? Are we seeing a resurgence of Surrealism in the wake of 9/11, in which the world now seems surreal or virtualized? Is there a clear line between fiction and critical thought?
In the work of the authors participating in this year's festival the conclusions are both serious and satirical, ranging from a feminist exploration of the lives of women artists to the story of a man who can't stop painting his deceased daughter, an illustrated work about a New England spirit medium at the dawn of photography to a surrealistic novel about a novel called The Bulgarian Truck, the mystery surrounding an exhibition of African art in Liverpool to a skewering of the art market that asks whether the art world just takes itself too seriously.
Selena Kimball's artwork for The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz
Poland will be represented by writer and scholar Agnieszka Taborska, author of The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz (tr. Danusia Stok, Midmarch Arts Press, 2007). The 2012 Festival marks Poland's third appearance at this annual event. The book Taborska will be presenting is her forthcoming work in Polish, The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks (Niedokończone życie Phoebe Hicks, Gdansk: slowo/obraz terytoria, 2013. Excerpts tr. Ursula Phillips for NLE 2012). The two volumes are Taborska's contemporary experiments in surrealism and a collaboration with American collage artist Selena Kimball, in which image and text join in parallel narratives. She will also be reading excerpts from her collection of flash fiction, The Whale, or Objective Chance (Wieloryb, czyli przypadek obiektywny, Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2010).
Panel discussions with all authors will be moderated by distinguished Polish-American art critic and writer Marek Bartelik, who will also read from his own work, Gentle Rain: journal of a nomadic critic (Łagodny Deszcz, Warsaw: Fundacja Twarda Sztuka, 2010).
Agnieszka Taborska (b. 1961) is a writer, art historian and translator of Philippe Soupault, Roland Topor, Gisèle Prassinos and Spalding Gray. Since 1988, she has lived between Warsaw, Poland and Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches the history of French Surrealism at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her most highly acclaimed book is The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz (tr. Danusia Stok, New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2007), published in Poland, France and the U.S., illustrated with 35 collages by the New York-based artist Selena Kimball. It is an apocryphal story about an eighteenth-century Spanish nun "discovered" by the French Surrealists who made her their patron saint. In this book, brought to the stage by the Parisian theatre Miettes de Spectacles, all the typical features of Taborska's style are present: irony, imagination, passion for language play, dark humor and erudition from which the history of Surrealism has no secrets.
Dr. Marek Bartelik studied art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris after moving from Poland to France in 1981. Bartelik holds a Master of Science degree in Civil Engineering from Columbia University and a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been teaching modern and contemporary art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York since 1996. He has been a Visiting Professor at Yale and MIT. He lectures nationally and internationally, among other places, at MoMA in New York; the Boston Museum of Art; the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw; the Municipal Museum in the Hague and the Mondrian House in Amersfoort, Holland; the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; and the Pinacoteca, São Paulo.
Other participants of the 2012 Festival are: Klemens Renoldner (Austria), Monika Zgustova (Czech Republic), Luc Lang (France), Marc Degens (Germany), Ricardo Menéndez Salmón (Spain), and Dumitru Tsepenaeg (Romania).
The readings are scheduled at Printed Matter, 192 Books and Institute Cervantes, and the discussions take place at the New York Public Library. All events are free and open to the public and take place between the 15th and 17th of November, 2012
Editor: SRS
Source: polishculture-nyc.org
thumbnail credits: Selena Kimball's artwork for The Dreaming Life of Leonora de la Cruz