Tuesday 9th July at Ben Uri from 6.30 pm.
There may be a few seats free so please seek an invitation to events@benuri.org
Ben Uri and the Boris Lurie Art Foundation Presents a very special presentation of Pennings Poemings, book of poems by artist and writer Boris Lurie (1924 – 2008) with readings by Anthony Rudolf from London and Igor Satanovsky from New York
Boris Lurie saw the worst of humanity. At a very young age, he was thrown by circumstances into one of the cruelest dramas of the 20th century as a victim and a witness, and it’s through his art and writings that we can trace the scale of the tragedy and trauma that still has major repercussions for humanity today. To understand Boris better is to gain a better insight into who we are and how we got here.
Born in Leningrad, Russia, in 1924 and raised in Riga, Latvia, Boris Lurie was taken prisoner by the Nazis at the age of sixteen and imprisoned for four years in a series of labor and concentration camps, including the Riga Ghetto, Buchwald and Stutthof. Lurie's mother, sister, grandmother, and teenage girlfriend were executed by Nazis. Lurie and his father survived and moved to New York City in 1946 and the younger Lurie began his career as an artist. In 1959, when along with Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, he founded the NO!art movement, which gained notoriety with exhibitions dealing with war, genocide, violence, racism, nuclear proliferation, consumerism, pornography, and the emerging art economy. The principle aim of NO!art was for total unabashed self-expression in art leading to social involvement.
Lurie would go on to additionally devote his efforts to writing, publishing essays, penning memoirs, In Riga, the novel House of Anita, and poetry. He continued to write in English, Russian, and German for the rest of his life.
In 2003, Boris Lurie published his German poems Geschriebigtes - Gedichtigtes with frommann-holzboog Verlag in Germany. Now, 21 years later, frommann-holzboog Verlag is publishing the English translation of the poems in collaboration with the Boris Lurie Art Foundation. The renowned and award-winning translator Andrew Shields has done the translation.
"Lurie's poetry develops a new power in the poetic translation into English by Andrew Shields. The pointed, fast-spoken language of the New Yorkers, which has characterised Lurie's everyday life since 1946, is perhaps already present in the German original. The free expression, corrupted by nothing and no one, is intended to be in his poetry, his art and his way of life in a fighting attitude."
—Eckhart Holzboog, the book publisher
"Translated by Andrew Shields, the handsome book Pennings Poemings contains a large selection of Boris Lurie’s writings in verse and short prose. Fast and furious, consciousness-streaming, and full of assertions of desire, they are an important counterpart to his visual works. Every so often his angry energy pauses for breath, and lyric poems, always eloquent, emerge from the sound and fury."
—Anthony Rudolf, an autobiographer, poet, literary critic, editor and translator
