On Tuesday, 29^th April at 6 pm the MOCAK Library would like to invite you to Jakub Kornhauser's lecture titled A Nut Terrorises Cities, Colours Have Turned into Storks, or On Some Special Cases of the Romanian Avant-garde.

The phenomenon of avant-garde movement in Romania has been slammed between "the periphery complex" and "synchrony with the history of world culture", between epigones of constructionism and renovators of surrealism, between the back of Tzara and Brâncuşi and the breast of Luca and Naum. Everything that is the most interesting and peculiar in Romanian literature and visual arts of 1920s, 30s and 40s has avant-garde roots. Those were the times of integral man and blood-thirsty objects that hunt him down. The programme: sarcophagi with soup, passive vampires, wild lungs, erotic horses, telebellies and everything else you always wanted to know about the Romanian avant-garde but were afraid to ask.

Jakub Kornhauser – literary scholar, translator, poet. He lectures on avant-garde art, the theory of literature and French and Romanian culture at the Institute of Romance Studies of the Jagiellonian University. He studies all forms of experimental and borderland literature, contemporary Polish, Romanian and French poetry, film and visual arts, Eastern European culture. He collaborates with numerous cultural institutions and magazines. A co-editor of two monographs, author of two volumes of poetry. He is currently working on the publication of his doctoral dissertation Status przedmiotu w poezji europejskiego surrealizmu (The status of object in the poetry of European surrealism).

A series of meetings with young researchers entitled Avant-garde of Central and Eastern Europe – Innovation or Imitation?, which is carried out at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University, is financed thanks to a grant from The National Programme for the Development of Humanities oraganised by The Ministry of Science and Higher Education. The main aim of the project is to answer the question whether the avant-garde movements arising in this part of Europe can be seen as a coherent trend in art and where its autonomy in regard to Western and Russian avant-garde might lie.

We encourage you to visit the project's website: www.awangarda-srodka.pl

Admission free. The session will be held in Polish.