Róbert Gál, Jakub Guziur, Martin Klimeš — TEXTS | author’s reading

LectureCella Gallery and Hovorny, Opava

RÓBERT GÁL, JAKUB GUZIUR, MARTIN KLIMEŠ — TEXTS 
13. 12. 2024 at 17.30h
Cella Gallery, Matiční 4, Opava

As part of the Paul Panhuysen exhibition, a reading by three authors who explore experimental and inter-genre literary approaches will take place.

Róbert Gál (1968), the enfant terrible of Slovak literature, has been devoted to philosophical aphorism for decades. From aphorism, he ventures into other genres such as prose, essays, and prose poetry. Despite minimal readership and critical recognition of his books, Róbert Gál has been the most frequently translated Slovak author into English for years, making him the most internationally renowned contemporary Slovak writer. His latest book, Tractatus (2021), loosely inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), has been published in English (Tractatus, 2022), as an audiobook (2023), and is set to be published in Turkey (2024) and Germany (2025). Fragments from The Silenced Life (2024), prepared for the Opava reading, follow the form of Tractatus and can be read as prose, poetry, or philosophy. More at www.robert-gal.com.

Jakub Guziur (1978) lives in Ostrava and studied English philology and the history of English and American literature at Palacký University in Olomouc. He has published several monographs on Anglo-American artists (The Myth of Ezra Pound /2004/, *Too Heavy a Lyre: Essays on Reconstructing Meaning in Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos /2008/, The Blinded Apollo, Castrated Dionysus: Views on Culture in the Modern Era /2008/, The Myth of Bob Dylan /2014/, Bob Dylan Among the Images: Intermedia Exploration /2016/, Ezra Pound in (Post)Culture: The Modernist’s Images in (Artistic) Media /2018/). He also works as a translator, editor, and curator. Jakub Guziur draws on international experimental poetry from the 1960s, situating his explorations within the context of the digital age. He has published five books of visual texts: Pavěk (2009), Protiznaky (2012), Visual Essay (2016), Revolver (2017), and Mythograms (2021). His verbal-visual works are summarized in the monograph Matisse’s Light (2023). He has exhibited his work since 2012 and is a member of Klub konkretistů 3. At Cella Gallery, Jakub Guziur will present his concept of the visual essay, an unconventional form blending visualized essayistic text with poetic meditation.

Martin Klimeš (1960) lives and works in Opava. Since the early 1980s, he has engaged in conceptual art, held several solo exhibitions, and participated in numerous group exhibitions. He has worked as a curator, gallery operator, and organizer of music-sound concerts and festivals. He is active in the Bludný kámen association. Alongside writing various treatises on visual art, he creates unusual texts and diaries. In 2024, he published Sound Diary. Martin Klimeš will read selections from the cycle Every Day, originally intended for a visual format and previously presented as such. Over several years, he recorded the sounds he heard at the same time each day. The list of sounds documents not only the soundscape of the author’s daily life but also the places he frequented. The texts from the Every Day cycle are more rooted in conceptual action than in literary tradition.