Sezgin Boynik at Summer School as School 2019
19 August, 2019, 19:00
Venue: Boxing Club

Summer School as School
5 - 21 August, 2019

Stacion - Center Contemporary Art Prishtina has the pleasure to announce "Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language" by Sezgin Boynik part of the Public Program of Summer School as School 2019.

Published by Rab-Rab Press, Coiled Verbal Spring brings together the first English translation of the Russian Formalist and Futurist writings on Lenin’s revolutionary language. The book includes the Russian Formalists’ (Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynyanov, Boris Tomashevsky, Lev Yakubinsky, and Boris Kazansky) most ‘political’ texts, first published in 1924 in the journal of the Left Front of the Arts (edited by Mayakovsky).

Together with this collection, the book also includes Futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh’s Devices of Lenin’s Speech, from 1925. Indispensable for any serious research dealing with the relationship between revolutionary politics and artistic forms, these writings had remained a marginal note, both in studies on avant-garde art, and in much literature on Formalist theory.

The publication will be presented by its editor Sezgin Boynik, who wrote an extensive introduction to the translations by contextualising the experiments of the Russian avant-garde through theories of conjuncture, or more precisely, the theory of contemporaneity within the revolutionary moment. It will be argued that without considering the radical form of historical novelty introduced by the October Revolution, which shaped the previous “Soviet” century, it will be difficult to understand the logic of avant-garde art suddenly changing its course in the beginning of the twenties. The lecture will present an examination of historical contradictions, especially those related to the New Economy Policy; the discontents of the state apparatuses inside Soviet hegemony; the antagonism towards capitalist everyday life; the limits of representation within revolutionary politics; the delineation of Productivism as the core revolutionary position that coerced bourgeois understandings of culture; and the discussion of Lenin and Trotsky’s logic when addressing the conjuncture of actual and internationalist positions and their strong theoretical repercussions.

Sezgin Boynik is a theoretician based in Helsinki. He completed his PhD on Yugoslav “Black Wave” cinema. He co- edited Nationalism and Contemporary Art: Critical Reader (MM & Exit, 2007) and History of Punk and Underground in Turkey (BAS, 2008). Recent publications include Noise After Babel: Language Unrestrained (Spector Books, 2015, with Minna Henriksson), In the Belly of the Beast: Art & Language New York Project (Rab-Rab Journal Vol. 4, No. 2, 2017, with Michael Corris) and Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin's Language (Rab-Rab Press, 2018). He is currently working on a monograph about the theoretical and political context of Black Audio Film Collective and on the collection of Yugoslav concrete poetry. He is editor of Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art, and Rab-Rab Press, an independent publishing platform based in Helsinki.