Ewa Partum – Active Poetry

Ewa Partum (born in 1945 near Warsaw, Poland) is a central figure in post-war avant-garde Conceptual and feminist art. While living behind the Iron Curtain, she began developing the idea of Active Poetry in the early 1970s – conducting events in the course of which she scattered white letters punched out of thin cardboard at different locations. The act of writing becomes a process of disseminating letters across landscapes and urban spaces. Playfully, she created a performative poetry, which manifests itself as a poetic process. At that time, the letters she poetically misused were established in socialist everyday life for their use by public institutions and organisations to craft posters and signs with propaganda messages for official occasions such as political rallies to celebrate national holidays.

For this iteration of Active Poetry, the artist used the beginning of James Joyce’s epochal novel Ulysses (1920) and meticulously counted the number of the individual letters needed. The total of 4,500 characters were distributed as punched-out letters on the 150 boxes in this edition.