The exhibition delves into themes of intimacy, identity, and the self offering critical reflections on these topics through various media. Since the 1990s, poetry’s evolution has been profoundly shaped by technological advancements, moving away from the printed page and becoming a more dynamic, interactive, and inclusive art form. The incorporation of multimedia, hypertext, video, the web, emerging technologies like blockchain, and the role of performance have all contributed to poetry’s transformation in the digital age.

«MATERIAL POETRY» bridges analog and digital realms, embedding poetry into various artistic media and bringing it out of the ordinary. The exhibition disrupts the linearity of text, creating a unique space where the poetic emerges in the digital domain. In these artworks, the artists translate life into visual language, merging text with the viewer’s mind to recreate the lived rhythms and social textures of particular times and spaces, allowing someone else’s voice, words, and body to be experienced intimately. Each work in the exhibition reveals a different facet of this transformation.

Ana María Caballero’s Paperwork reflects the materiality of poetry and its role in transmitting memory. Through performances in cities such as Los Angeles, Bogotá, and Valencia, Caballero gathered audience reactions to her poetry, which she then used to generate digital paper sculptures. These sculptures invoke the architectural elements of each city, blending the personal with the public, and presenting poetry as both message and medium in a new, digital form.

In Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s «THE OCEAN REMEMBERED YOUR BODY», players navigate a text-based video game that explores identity and memory. The ocean serves as both a metaphor and a physical space, drawing on the artist’s personal history and honoring the narratives of marginalized bodies. Inspired by early text-based adventure games, the piece encourages players to engage deeply with their imaginations, reconstructing the world from their own experiences and histories.

Eduardo Kac’s Letter, originally created as a VR experience, presents a poem in the form of two spiraling cones made of text. The work draws the viewer into an immersive reading experience, where the text can be rotated and navigated in three-dimensional space. Referencing moments of birth and death in the poet’s family, the poem’s emotional weight is amplified by its dynamic form. Letter is a powerful exploration of the spatial possibilities of language and is presented here in its video version, evocative of its vintage interactive form.

In Franziska Ostermann’s «Can you hear me?", the artist stages a virtual Zoom call between different versions of herself. The fragmented conversations, filled with questions like «Can you hear me?», highlight the challenges of authentic connection in the digital space. The piece underscores the alienation and separation caused by the very technology that enables the meeting, as the selves attempt to connect but never quite align.

Finally, Sasha Stiles’ «Cursive Binary: Portrait of the Poet (Variation 1)» is a layered, generative work that merges poetry with AI and digital language. Stiles collaborates with her AI alter ego to reinterpret her poem Portrait of the Poet as a Brief History of Humanity, transforming it into Cursive Binary - a language she developed for transhuman communication. The piece explores the intersection of human and machine, questioning the future of authorship and identity in a posthuman world.

Material Poetry is more than a collection of artworks – it is an intimate dialogue between language and form, with poetry becoming a living, breathing artifact: multifaceted and dynamic. These works challenge binary thinking and embrace hybridity, expanding our capacity to experience, comprehend, and engage with language on a deeply visceral level. They invite us into the ever-evolving story of what it means to be human.

Space architect: Mohsen Hazrati

Flyer design: Klaudyna Koźmińska

Sound: Shervin Saremi

Le Random: The exhibition is generously supported by Le Random.