Join us for an evening exploring ‘Poetry and Spiritualism’ inside Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibition, Alienarium 5.
Author and lecturer Tatiana Kontou will engage with Gonzalez-Foerster’s immersive and multimedia 360-degree collage, Metapanorama, through a discussion around Victorian spiritualist concerns, psychoanalysis, and 19th century optical toys and modes of display. Kontou’s presentation will be accompanied by a reading given by poet and artist Precious Okoyomon.
There is limited capacity for the event and tickets must be reserved in advance.
The event will take place inside Serpentine South Gallery, is fully wheelchair-accessible, and will be filmed and photographed.
Artist biographies
Tatiana Kontou is Senior Lecturer in 19th-century literature at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is the author of Spiritualism and Women’s Writing (Palgrave, 2009) and editor of Women and the Victorian Occult (Routledge, 2010). She has co-edited with Sarah Willburn, The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult (Ashgate, 2012), and edited a volume of primary sources on Anti-Spiritualism, 1840-1930 (Routledge, 2014). Kontouhas also contributed essays and journal articles on spiritualism, psychical research, Wilkie Collins, and Florence Marryat, who was an avid spiritualist and prolific Victorian popular author. Tatiana’s most recent project is a six-volume collection of primary sources on Victorian Material Culture (Routledge, 2023).
Precious Okoyomon is a Nigerian-American poet and artist. Their work considers the natural world, histories of migration and racialization, and the pure pleasures of everyday life. They have had institutional solo exhibitions at the LUMA Westbau in Zurich (2018), the Museum Für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2020), Performance Space New York (2021), and the Aspen Art Museum (2021). They were included in the 59th Venice Biennale, the 58th Belgrade Biennial as well as group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and the LUMA Arles, France. Major performances have been commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries, London (2019) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2019). Their second book of poetry But Did U Die? will be co-published by the Serpentine Galleries and Wonder Press in 2022. Okoyomon was a 2020 artist-in-residence at the LUMA Arles, and they are the 2021 recipient of the Frieze Art Fair Artist Award, as well as the 2022 Chanel Next Art Prize.
