Sunday September 15, 4pm
Jonas Mekas Poetry Day
In collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, the Estate of Jonas Mekas, and the Lithuanian Culture Institute
Program organized by Julius Ziz
Free Admission
Microscope is very pleased to present an evening of poetry and film by Jonas Mekas as part of the Centre Pompidou’s Jonas Mekas Poetry Day being celebrated at venues around the world on September 15th, 2024. The event at the gallery is curated by Julius Ziz and organized in collaboration with the Estate of Jonas Mekas and Lithuanian Culture Institute.
The program features a screening of Mekas’ 16mm film “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” (1972). The 88-minute diaristic film, which centers around themes of displacement, family, friends, language is composed not only with footage of Mekas’ return to Lithuania and his small village of Semeniškiai in August 1971 for the first time in 27 years after fleeing the country with his brother during WWII; but also with scenes filmed between 1950 and 1953 shortly after his arrival in New York City of him and his brother going about their daily lives, including in their Williamsburg, Brooklyn neighborhood; and Mekas in Vienna, Austria with friends including Peter Kubelka, Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson, and Ken Jacobs also during August of 1971. The film, which was Mekas’ second major work, was selected into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
The screening is preceded by rare audio of Mekas reading on of his earliest poems in his native Lithuanian language, followed by a live reading by Nathlie Provosty, an artist and friend of Mekas, of the English translation and followed by short videos of Mekas reading or performing his poetry in Berlin and Willisau, Switzerland.
Admission is free.
Special thanks to Julius Ziz, Gražina Michnevičiūtė (Lithuanian Culture Institute), Sebastian Mekas, Ines Henzler (Centre Pompidou), and Nathlie Provosty.
Program:
Audio recording of Jonas Mekas reading poems from his first book “Idylls of Semeniškiai” originally published in 1948 in postwar Germany. Recorded in Mekas’ loft in Brooklyn, NY in 2016. In Lithuanian language.
Reading of the same poems as translated by Vyt Bakaitis in “There is No Ithaca,” by Nathlie Provosty. In English language.
Screening of “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” (1972, 16mm film, color, sound, 88 minutes) by Jonas Mekas in its original format.
Video of Mekas reading his “Requiem for the Twentieth Century,” recorded by Audrius Naujokaitis on February 16th, 2000 at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, New York.
Video of Mekas performing with the New York band The Himalayas at the Willisau Jass Festival, Willisau, Switzerland in the summer of 2007.
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Nathlie Provosty (b. 1981) is a visual artist based in New York, primarily working in painting, drawing, and artist books. Her first one-person exhibition in New York opened in 2012 at an experimental artist-run gallery called 1:1, and she has since exhibited nationally and internationally including solo shows at the ICA Milano, Italy (2023); Risorgimento Museum in Turin, Italy; Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York; and A Palazzo Gallery in Italy; Her most recent presentations have been at Gagosian London, in a group exhibition; with APalazzo; and with her old friend Nina Johnson in Miami. Works have been exhibited at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway; Colby Museum of Art, Maine; and the Washington University Museum, DC. She has produced five books, and is currently working on two more, and is additionally preparing for an upcoming solo drawing exhibition in Milan, and presentation of new work at Frieze London. Provosty first met Jonas Mekas in 2007 in his Greenpoint loft at approximately 1am, where he sat at his circular table with a bottle of Polish vodka that was shaped like a woman “wearing” a red strapless dress.
Julius Ziz for many years worked with Jonas Mekas at Anthology Film Archives in new York, curating many film exhibitions. Ziz’s films were shown in museums including MoMA, The Whitney Museum, Cinémathèque Française, Centre Pompidou, Tokyo National Film Museum, as well as international film festivals including Rotterdam, Berlin, Montréal, SanPaulo, Karlovy Vary, Dublin, and Rio, among others. His films are in the collections of MoMA, Cinémathèque Française, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and Austrian National Film Museum.