“Poetry and Contemporary Visual Culture” conference – a retrospective view

16 June 2022

Photo: privat

From May 19 to May 21, 2022, our first international and interdisciplinary conference “Poetry and Contemporary Visual Culture / Lyrik und zeitgenössische Visuelle Kultur” took place in Hamburg under the direction of Dr. Wiebke Vorrath and Magdalena Korecka, MA. Both scholars are research associates in the sub-project of the same name.

The fifteen conference talks came from the fields of literary, media, and film studies, visual culture studies and linguistics. The speakers were Hannes Bajohr (Basel), Svenja Blum (Hamburg), Astrid Böger (Hamburg), Heinz Drügh (Frankfurt a. M.), Lucy English (Bristol), Vladimir Feshchenko (Moscow), Esther Kilchmann (Hamburg), Tijana Koprivica (Vienna), Magdalena Korecka (Hamburg), Maksim Lepekhin (Dresden), María Mencía (London), Karin Nykvist (Lund), Sylvia Sasse (Zurich), Olga Sokolova (Moscow), Jörgen Schäfer (Siegen), and Hiroshi Yamamoto (Tokyo).

In five multifaceted panels (link to the program), we addressed the relationship between poetic language and (audio)visual media, as well as the configurative dimensions of book poetry, poetry films, and digital and digitalized visual poetry such as poems on social media and code poetry. We discussed visual artistic forms of documentation and reflections on sociopolitical topics like war and displacement, as well as anti-racist and feminist poetic movements within the scope of social media participation. Other focusses of the talks included the techniques, practices, and aesthetics of poetry films, and deixis as a linguistic marker in contemporary pandemic and anti-war poetry, as well as aspects and possibilities of (visually) translating poetry. Finally, Chris Kerr (Brighton) demonstrated in his lecture performance not only that code poetry can be looked at and read but that it can be performed orally as well.

You will find a recording of the lecture performance on our website (link to the video). The results of the conference will be published in 2023 with a few additional contributions on poetry and visual culture. It will be available both in print and open access in our new book series with De Gruyter (link to the book series).

Link to the pictures of the conference