The history of the word as image, the visual poem, stretches back to ancient times, but in the last hundred years has been punctuated by seminal moments allied to breakthroughs across artforms, such as Constructivism, Dada, Fluxus. In the 21st Century the availability and ease of new technologies for design and production of visual poems has created a global practice. An almost infinite variety of forms and procedures from 3-dimensional constructions, classical shaped poems, hand-written, concrete, graphic, and digital, poets reinvent the alphabet and the language in the visual.

In surveying the best in contemporary practice from around the world the exhibition also poses two questions: does the global phenomenon of visual poetry represent a new artistic language? Or is this international practice a dialogue between differing national styles or ‘dialects’?

Artists confirmed:  Alan Halsey, Stephen Nelson, Helen White, Amaranth Borsuk, John MAlan Halsey, Stephen Nelson, Helen White, Amaranth Borsuk, John Moore Williams, Karri Kokko, Matt Dalby, Andrew Topel, Christian Bök, Grzegorz Wróblewski, Marco Giovenale, Márton Koppány, Geof Huth, Nico Vassilakis, Derek Beaulieu, Satu Kaikkonen, Aysegül Tözeren, Steve Dalachinsky, Mike Cannell, Eric M. Zboya, Stephen Butler, Alexander Jorgensen, Zeynep Cansu Baseren, Sheila Murphy and many more…

The picture shows the installation of Andrew Topel’s zimZalla object Blueprints. Read more about Wonder Rooms and The Text Festival here.