Jiří Valoch - reading

Sue Tompkins - performance A Bee crawling around in the flower dome

The performance and reading will be followed by a discussion with both artists and the curator, and a small party will take place before the end of the exhibition.



British artist Sue Tompkins is exhibiting a fragile textual installation at tranzitdisplay. In addition to her typescript works, performances represent an important part of her art. The written materials for Tompkins’ performances consist of a carefully edited file of texts written on a number of individual sheets; it could also be said that Tompkins reads and sings during her performances that which she’d written beforehand. But there’s a lot more to it. She works with intonations and with time, with rhythm and repetition; she offers up words and sounds through the microphone and separates them from each other and from herself, thereby intensifying the connection between herself and her audience.



Jiří Valoch is the author of textual installations; he’s already published two collections of haikus and more of his poetry awaits publication. Recently, he’s been performing all the more frequently in galleries and has reduced the textual component of his performance to a single syllable. Although his textual installations and typescript poetry are based on working with a specific space and with the graphic form of the textual structure, he has already read them several times. This will, however, be the first time in Prague that his texts enter a space via a voice and that the repetitive structures resound in a kind of rhyme.