Revolutionary Futures: After Khlebnikov

January 2017

This month we returned to the great poet and writer Velimir Khlebnikov, this time with events in London. Working with Kings College and Pushkin House, we’ll bring together Nikita Kadan, Iced Architects, Ana Riaboshenko, Donald Rayfield, Margarita Glutzberg, curators and academics to plan for a series of small ‘open Khlebnikov studios across London and internationally. These were ‘accessible’ spaces of revolutionary activity, where dreams are nurtured and creative ideas fermented. Join us on Thursday 26th January at Kings College London to explore these ideas. 

At Pushkin House we hosted Glossolalia  - a sound installation based on Khlebnikov’s Language of the Future by the Iced Architects which ran at Pushkin House from 25th January 2017. 

September 2014

Last week, I spent a few days by the beautiful seaside of the Georgian port, Batumi, on the Black Sea. I was there to begin After Khlebnikov – contemporary artistic responses to the writing of the brilliant maverick avant-garde Russian futurist writer Velimir Khlebnikov who wrote in a mass variety of media – poems, plays, manifestos, sagas elucidating his utopianist dreams, his theories of zaum (a universal language which transcended national and ethnic lines), a love of nature, ornithology and mysticism, of numerology, architecture and pacifism. Crazy beautiful texts, pretty much untranslatable into any language, including Russian…

We brought together some wonderful artists from across the Region, from Azerbaijan, Uzhbekhistan, Russia, Georgia and Ukraine to read, discuss, explore the city through the eyes of the poet and to see each other’s work. The ideas that arose were suitably as utopian and diverse as Khblebnikov’s own. We now return to plot some more…