POÈME SBJKT

an exhibition of works of literature both on and off the blockchain that enhance, reinvent and reimagine the relationship between text & image, analog & digital, blurring + challenging the lines that seek to divide.

exhibiting May 25 – July 15 at Librairie Métamorphoses | 17 Rue Jacob, 75006, Paris

featuring works by

Kevin ABOSCH / Mark AMERIKA / Kate ARMSTRONG / Robbie BARRAT Connie BAKSHI / Lillian-Yvonne BERTRAM / Christian BÖK Ana María CABALLERO / CEGZ.Project / Tina CHANG Victoria CHANG / Franny CHOI / Alexandra CROUWERS / Joe DEVLIN Adam DISBROW / Emily EDELMAN / Herbert W. FRANKE x VOICEGEMS / Dianna FRID Ross GOODWIN / Kalen IWAMOTO / Laura KERR / Alison KNOWLES Diana LOBO / Drew MAILEN / Mieke MARPLE / Vera MOLNAR Nick MONTFORT / Astra PAPACHRISTODOULOU / Ronnie Angel POPE Julien SILVANO / Sasha STILES / Alida SUN / Agnès THURNAUER Bernar VENET / aurèce vettier / Roy VORAGEN

HANDHELD POEMS, an Infinite Objects collection curated by Jess Conaster x Studio As We Are

featuring

Denise DUHAMEL / Gisel FLOREZ / Pierre GERVOIS David HERNÁNDEZ / Rose JACKSON-FORSYTH Nathaniel STERN / Prince UDE / Julie Marie WADE

POESÍA DE PROTESTA II, curated by Gladys Garrote and produced by Elisabeth Sweet

Alexandra Lytton REGALADO / Amalia MORENO / Ana María CABALLERO Andrea HALABY / Anya ASANO / ARTJEDI1 / Caridad MORO-GRONLIER Ellie PRITTS / Fermina PONCE / Gab FLORAMICA / Genki NISHIDA Iván CASÍS / Legna Rodríguez IGLESIAS / Martica MINIPUNTO Mia LEONIN / NURART / Roberto SALAZAR / Silvina López MEDIN Tabitha SWANSON / Tuna BORA

the exhibition catalogue includes essays by

Mark AMERIKA / Derek BEAULIEU / Christian BÖK / Ana María CABALLERO / Jess CONATSER / Jesse DAMIANI / Alex ESTORICK / Gladys GARROTE / Kalen IWAMOTO / Nick MONFORT / Nathaniel STERN / Sasha STILES / Elisabeth SWEET / aurèce vettier / Harry YEFF / L’Avant Galerie / theVERSEverse

purchase the catalogue in two ways:

view the exhibition on-chain at exhibited.at

special thanks to our partners at L’Avant Galerie and Librairie Métamorphoses

Arthur FOSSE / Alban CAUSSE / Suzanne CÔTÉ / Michael SCOGNAMILLO / Albertine MEUNIER / Caroline VOSSEN

and Paul MOUGINOT for connecting us.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

by theVERSEverse

Words and art have a long, intertwined history – from the origins of letters in pictograms to illuminated manuscripts and photo captions to text-to-image AI tools that use natural speech to conjure visions. But outside the rare exceptions, like text-based, conceptual, or instruction-based art, the marriage between words and art hasn’t always been balanced.

In galleries and museums, though we’re used to encountering bits of poetic language adhered to walls as incisive quotes or mood-setters, poems aren’t often the main event. When the artist interpolates verse into a canvas, sculpture or projection, they ground an infinitely reproducible idea in a unique work, conferring “value”; meanwhile, the writer’s singular output is typeset, printed and reprinted, making its way into the world as infinitely reproducible copies. Books of poetry contain dozens of meticulously sculpted texts, representing vast hours, days, weeks and years of reading and revision and revelation, but are usually published in paperback form and sell for relatively tiny sums.

Poetry may be revered, but it’s not typically granted participation in the art market in a way that fully recognizes the depth and breadth of its contributions. Poetry’s cultural agency usually is relegated to the land of the immaterial, the ephemeral, the ethereal – but nothing is more material than verse, than those words that frame and shape our understanding of the world in a way that expands our understanding of it.

POEME OBJKT/POEME SBJKT is a two-part exploration of what happens when authorship and diverse artistic practices collide in poetic synthesis, affirming words themselves as works of art. This group survey of writers, visual artists, typographical alchemists and creative technologists traces the trajectory of text as it evolves off the page, expanding the conventional bounds of how poetry is experienced, inviting it into physical and virtual spaces alike via a multiplicity of mediums and technologies, including blockchain as a means of publishing, distribution and record-keeping.

In this gallery-wide anthology – curated by theVERSEverse in partnership with L’Avant Galerie Vossen and Librairie Métamorphoses in Paris – language becomes both the subject and object of art. Poems are embodied as playful products, linguistic machinations, live performance, immersive audio, tactile sculptures, textured canvases, dynamic screens and communal activities. As contemporary expressions of André Breton’s “poem-object,” these diverse yet interlinked pieces (ranging from traditional to experimental, conceptual to computational) are examples of literature that enhance, reinvent and reimagine the relationship between text and image, analog and digital.

Many of them exist both IRL and as NFTs – digital artworks minted as token “objkts” on the blockchain, imbued with the metadata to establish provenance and enable the intensely powerful transaction from a writer’s imagination to a reader’s personal collection. In so doing, the show invites a reconsideration of how we believe a poem might look, sound and behave – and ultimately, asks us to reevaluate the cultural currency of verse.

–theVERSEverse
Paris, May 2023