On 12.11 at the familiar space of Complex 01, the talk “Poetry, the poetic current in contemporary culture” took place with poetry enthusiasts in the audience. It was a discussion rich in cross-disciplinary knowledge that was also poetic and inspirational.
While the talk was titled “poetry” and connected the audience with “poetry”, it could be said that its scope of discussion was much broader than that. The “poetic current” mentioned in the talk was a metaphor for inspiration present in many different art forms; therefore, the panel of 04 speakers led by poet and film critic Nguyễn Vũ Hiệp not only defined poetry, but also went beyond to explore the roots of arts and artistic perception.
Dr Đinh Minh Hằng and her presentation “Modern poetry – The forms” began the event by opening up new thinking and feeling about poetry and contemporary art. For poetry, the old way of reading poems that only focuses on what stories they tell is no longer suitable for contemporary poetry, when poetry is almost similar to painting, and blurs the boundaries with other art forms. Understanding contemporary poetry, therefore, can only be done with an open mind. She also mentioned the transition to contemporary art through the periods, which led to her view: “Not everything is art, but anything can be art”.
Visual artist mi-mimi presented her works, hidden in which are poetic materials: impromptu videos with poetry reading combined with ambience sounds, or pieces of paper on which she “drew” “pink poems”. The works showed the audience the emergence and convergence between different formats in art when the artist practices poetry anytime, anywhere, constantly exploring and experimenting with different expressions to tell their own story.
Photographer Duy Phương expresses poetry present in his documentary photography. He always defines his works as documentative and realistic yet also contain poetry and poetic qualities. For him, life is inherently poetic, and it is his job to bring the entirety of that poetry into his works. His photography style is half-arranged, half-documentary, creating tremendously interesting works that took arrangement yet appear random.
Artist MYAN led event participants to the inner world of the artist with the connections between poetry, photography and video as a multimedia narrative through the poetry-photo book “6s.10M.Khoảnh khắc()Dịch chuyển” (lit. 6s.10M.Moment()Movement). Through short poems with a clever arrangement of images and words, symbols and characters, MYAN’s story of “moments” in her “movement” across Europe reached the audience in a natural, inspiring way.
In the chat with the speakers, the audience had the opportunity to dig deeper into poetry and arts. Poet and film critic Nguyễn Vũ Hiệp opened up discussions on the topics of the means and the methods in artistic practice, and poetry – the artist’s inspiration. Event participants also raised questions about the convergence points and differences between poetry and other art forms as well as whether artists are constantly bound to interpret the ideas behind their works.
The exchange opened up interesting perspectives and inspirations in arts, and was concluded with the idea that inspiration, and obsession, are actually very natural; and that when an artwork reaches the audience in a different form that was not in the artist’s intention, but that is what creates the diversity in arts.
