Solucanlar ve Rapunzel ( Worms and Rapunzel)

Erkut Tokman (İstanbul,1971-) is a Turkish poet, performance and visual artist,editor and translator . He used to live and work respectively in London, Bucharest,Milan İstanbul where he studied poetry, modern dance and acting yet now lives in İzmir. His first visual and digital art works took shape in late 90s and begining of milenium with serial works called Dadadairies and İstanbul Plaques where he colllaborted with international artists from Romania, Turkey and U.S.A which were repesented in mail-art projects as well as exhibitions and online publishings and as an artist later on with his new visual/ digital art works he is accepted to Archtypel Expressionism Art  Movement. He is the founder of AÇIK ŞİİR- poetry movement which is interdisciplinary dedicated to performance poetry and art. His performances took place Poetry Cafe-London, Venice-Borders Art Festival, Bi-Nevi Sahne-İzmir and LitVest -Romania. He was Turkish Sofa Radio program director in Trafika Europe Radio where he promoted Turkish literature.  His interviews with Orhan Pamuk, Joyce Carol Oates, Adonis, Aslı Erdoğan, Milo de Angelis, Alice Notley, Manrico Murzi etc. were published at well-known international reviews such as World Literature Today, The Poetry Review, Poesis International. He translated five poetry book from Romanian, İtalian and English. He received İtaly’s prestigious translation award from İtalian Ministery of Culture in 2019 with the prefaced by Yevgeni Yevtuşenko and designs by Adonis and Quasimodo Jaci and Messina Citte Di Arte International Poetry Awards. He has five poetry book published. His last poetry book “Lupoc” triggered discussions on Turkish poetry scene in return received in total around 25 articles written and interviews realized on. He is member of İtaly and Turkish PEN centers as well as Poetry Society and Exiled Writers Ink. of U.K. He currently writes for Tersdergi and Muhalif newspaper..

About his visual and digital works: His first visual poetry inspirations took root from some photographic and cinematographic images as well as social and politic matters of 20th century in which he discovered the visuality and reflected on behind his early verses that gave its first rise to his earlier experimental and visual poetry next to contemporenean and clasical poetry writing, however in late 90s and at the begining of milenium, this slight rise of experimentalism in his poetry against classical approach was not sufficiant for the poet sothat he decided bearingly to take new step into experimantal and visual poetry in enhanced extend deconstructing and recontructing photographic images as juxtaposed with poetic verses, as a result, he created “Old Istanbul Plaques” series in four volume on the surface of stone plaque’s covers composed on İstanbul adding on poignant, improvised lyric trilingual verses  that depicted nostalgia and his love of the city. Afterwards he continued on developing his visual-art concept with “Dada Dairies” new serial visual works again as in  four volumes where he conjointed social,political and artistic events of 20th century in cronicals  juxtaposing with photographes or photographed art pieces by the contemporary international artists of various art diciplines from his artistic circle such as photographers,sculptors, opera artists etc. As a result he randomly created the poem from the cronicals which was the routine end of the each volume. Those new works especially Dadadairies evoked his interest and desire to practice avangarde art movements in his poems on further in widening his newly created experimantal and visual artistic perspective on the cartesian plane where he continously underlined social problems of the era and  requestioned them around chosen thematic subjects on anti-war, women and children rights etc.  In the years ahead, specifically  inbetween 2006-2012 hardly ever produced  any new ones until his  new visual art work called “From the journey of  a rose  towards unknown lands” came into life which was woven with the images of İtalian amateur photographer’s photographes  taken on nature and daily life objects and its people along with Tokman’s own created visual art images around written story as undertexted after each arranged group of photographes in depiction of a photo-novel. Inwards the years 2012-2019 he was focused and inclined on rather different dimensions on art and literature varying from translational and editorial works to performance until his last  poetry book ”Lupoc” was published in 2019 in which more than those he delibaretly veered into new dimensions in visual poetry and experimented on new possibilites in reseacrh of poetic language as a result he hybritly decontructed and reconsturacted his new poetic language as multi-layered, multi-visual, multi-dimensional benefiting on social, science-fictional,avant-garde,semiotical, ontological,philosophical and semantical elements, in doing so, he practised indepentedly in his poetry the punctuations, symbols, matrix structures, formulas in a new way and triggered discussions in Turkish poetry. By taking fly from “Lupoc”s experimental approach he unlimited his writing borders unleashing and liberating himself from contemporary poetry’s classical tendicies towards his new authentic,experimental and visual discourse seen as no way around, to this end he embarked on writing another new serial visual poems called “O’nun şiirleri” (Poems of third person) where he applied illimitably his own revolitionary visual recreation in constant development of new visual language widening it as  multi-dimensional within newest usages of  symbols, punctuations and visual imagery by minimazing  the text (also words or verses) almost next to nothing even none in order to offer readers  eternally endless visual space to make them ponder on a new possibilities of poetic thought and aesthetic rahther than  clasical and contemporenean tendicies of today’s poetry. After all he defended as keep saying that to create new visual language is vital to transform usual visual poetry in respond to new digital age. His latest visual approach has lately evolved in its own creational process metamorphosing from visual to digital art as a result of Tokman’s his own inner look towards art history wherein he felt by himself  as  a painter rather than the poet  in the absolute absence of the language in revolt against obliviousness, thus  thereupon in abstraction of  new digitalized and visual imagery  of him replaced by the verses  constantly on ontological, spritual,philosphical, metaphysical planes. We can easly observe those elements especially in his works called “O’nun Rüyası”(Dream of third person) and “O’nun Müziği” (Music of third person) where also semiotical ,mathametical and symetrical aspects of traditional, orientalist art of caligraphy  applied in his Eastern look beside Western. In that new look, his art conceptually, digitally,virtually, pilosophically and ontologically turns its plane from cartesian to the-fourth dimensional Einsteinian relativistic plane as a performative way as though asking readers directly involve in poetry to act and react on the spot to attempt for a new step in life by rethinking on existed realities of our World.

Michaela Čecháková: (2002, Ostrava, Czech republic) is conceptual artist, sculptor, painter and poetry event organizer. She studied sculpture at SUŠ umělecká a gymnázium s.r.o.  and is currently studying at Faculty of Fine Arts of University of Ostrava. She debuted with a group exhibition in the Provoz gallery. Then she continued on with a group exhibition in the Kruh gallery and a solo exhibitions in the Mlečný bar naproti, she presented her art videos in the Véčko gallery and she performed with Erkut Tokman at micro festival 2024.