On Tuesday, 27^th May at 6 pm the MOCAK Library would like to invite you to Michalina Kmiecik's lecture Between Krakow and Lodz. On the activities of the 'a.r.' artistic group.

Already the first statement of the 'a.r.' group, apart from the swaggering slogans of ruthless combat with the senile decay of pseudo-modernists, includes postulates of collaboration between art and poetry and the simultaneous development of both of them. To achieve the goal defined in such a way it was necessary to create a book whose graphic form would not fall behind the verse printed in it. In 1930 the task was undertaken jointly by Julian Przyboś and Władysław Strzemiński in the volume of poetry From Beyond/Z ponad, which has become one of the best examples of Polish functional printing. During the lecture we shall talk not only about the history of the uneasy marriage of Przyboś's verse with Strzemiński's spatial imagination, but also about the intellectual passions they shared, their fierce ideological and aesthetic disputes and creating a non-uniform, but very strong new wave of avant-garde art in the interwar Lodz.

Michalina Kmiecik graduated from comparative studies at the Jagiellonian University. She is now working in the Department of Literary Theory of her home university on her doctoral thesis dedicated to the negative aesthetics in the poetry and avant-garde music of the 20^th century. She is the author of the book Oblicza miejsca. Topiczne i atopiczne wyobrażenia przestrzeni w poezji Juliana Przybosia (Universitas 2013). She is interested in the theory of the avant-garde, intermediality and geopoetics.

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 at 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

The session will be held in Polish. Free admission.