Andrei Monastyrski, Elementary Poetry
Reading and conversation with Boris Groys, Brian Droitcour, Yelena Kalinsky, Daniel Bozhkov, and Ksenia Nouril

Andrei Monastyrski has received international recognition for his work with Collective Actions, a group of artists and writers who began to organize outdoor actions on the edge of Moscow in 1976. However, Monastyrski came to art practice through poetry, experimenting with sound, form, and audience participation. In 2011, e-flux hosted the exhibition Out of Town: Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions, curated by Boris Groys, who has also written a preface for Monastyrski’s Elementary Poetry, a new volume published by Ugly Duckling Presse and Soberscove Press. This book makes available for the first time in English many of Monastyrski’s poems, books, and action objects from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, tracing a genealogy of the art action in poetry. 

Join us with translators Yelena Kalinsky and Brian Droitcour for a reading from Elementary Poetry, with an introduction by Boris Groys and a conversation about Monastyrski’s work with Daniel Bozhkov and Ksenia Nouril.

Daniel Bozhkov is a visual artist invested in exploring the multiple international legacies of Conceptual Art. He is an Associate Professor of Art, New Genres at Hunter College, New York City, and has taught as a Lecturer at Columbia University Visual Arts Division, and Yale University School of Art.

Brian Droitcour is a writer, translator, and curator, as well as a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at New York University. From 2002 to 2007 he lived in Moscow, where he covered exhibitions for The Moscow Times, contributed to the Russian art monthly Artchronika and edited their English digest editions, and translated books for WAM Knigi, an art publisher. He has contributed essays and reviews to Artforum, Art in America, Rhizome, The New Inquiry, and other publications. 

Boris Groys is a philosopher, essayist, art critic, and media theorist. He is a Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe, and a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School/EGS.

Yelena Kalinsky is an art historian based in Lansing, MI. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History in 2013 from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey with a dissertation entitled “Collective Actions: Moscow Conceptualism, Performance, and the Archive, 1976-1989.” In 2012, she edited and translated a volume of audience recollections of early Collective Actions performances for Soberscove Press. Previously, she worked as an archivist and Dodge curatorial fellow at the Zimmerli Art Museum, where she curated the exhibition Performing the Archive: Collective Actions in the 1970s & 1980s. Her writing has appeared in ARTMargins, Russian Literature, Nova Galerija Newspapers, and elsewhere.

Ksenia Nouril is the Jensen Bryan Curator at The Print Center in Philadelphia. From January 2015 to September 2017, she was the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Fellow for Central and Eastern European Art at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has organized exhibitions of global modern and contemporary art at the Bruce Museum, Lower East Side Printshop, MoMA, and Zimmerli Art Museum. Ksenia lectures widely and frequently writes for international exhibition catalogues, magazines, and academic journals, including ARTMargins Online, The Calvert Journal, Institute of the Present, OSMOS, and Woman’s Art Journal. She has published two books: Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology (co-editor and contributor, MoMA, 2018) and Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov: Stories About Ourselves (editor and contributor, Rutgers University Press, 2019). Ksenia holds a BA in Art History and Slavic Studies from New York University and an MA and PhD in Art History from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.