LURIE’S LYRICS

Multimedia performance about the Holocaust survivor and style-setting New York artist Boris Lurie

Boris Lurie, 1924-2008, visual artist, concentration camp survivor, NO!art founder, New Yorker from Riga. And author: in his book “Geschriebigtes – Gedichtigtes” unadorned narrative, poetry and wicked lightness merge as in hardly any other work dealing with survival in and after the Holocaust. “I acquired the foundations of my artistic education in concentration camps like Buchenwald,” Lurie wrote. He collages images of piles of corpses with pinups, attacking fascism, racism and the sexism of consumer society. His poems combine raw expression, irrepressible fluency, and playful poetry infused with music. ‘Lurie's Lyrics’ is an experimental multimedia performance that makes Lurie's previously little known texts resonate – and does so with vitality and the courage of paradox. The evening pays tribute to a great non-conformist who did not want superficial meaning, but in the words of Volkhard Knigge, “outcry and confrontation”. Munich-based voice artist and performer Julia Wahren and conceptual artist Rudolf Herz premiered their project at the Munich Kammerspiele last fall. Egbert Tholl wrote about it in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: “This is not an evening that wants to explain something; it is an evening whose associative power obsesses and haunts you.”