Tonight No Poetry Will Serve by Alfredo Jaar offers a powerful reflection on the limits of language and the role of creative expression in times of tragedy. A lament for today’s darkness and a call to find the words to confront these tragic hours, the bold new public intervention displays the arresting title of a poem by Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), a figure of inspiration for Jaar since the 1980s, who observed the limits of words in times of unthinkable violence: “no poetry can serve to mitigate such acts, they nullify language itself,” she wrote in 2011.

Throughout November 2023, Alfredo Jaar and CIRCA commissioned a series of poetic dialogues, curated by Vittoria de Franchis, from international writers, thinkers and speakers. Giving voice to those who find themselves silenced or without words, the poems hope to achieve Rich’s ambition that creative expression can reconcile conflicting realities.

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Jessica Mitrani reads Rahel Varnhagen : The Life of a Jewess

by Hannah Arendt, translated by Richard and Clara Winston

Her knowledge, her sufferings, her joys would die with her, but these verses would not die. And they would carry her with them into the future.

And so it is

again and again that rhythm will carry us away, carry us along to the place where those who come after us, no matter what they are like, will learn what we know

Jessica Mitrani (b. 1968, Barranquilla) is a New York–based artist. Mitrani’s multivalent works are concerned with exploring social, linguistic, and aesthetic constructs of the feminine. Her work has been exhibited, performed, screened, and broadcast internationally, including at OCD Chinatown, New York; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York;Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; French Institute Alliance Française, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bogotá Museum of Modern Art MAMBO; Marfa Film Festival, Texas; Medellin Museum of Modern Art MAMM; Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany; and ARTE1 television network, Brazil. In the fall of 2022, Mitrani was invited faculty at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.

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Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poetic Dialogues

Hanne Lippard

Shirley Manson

Ivan Cheng

Annie Rockson

H Sinno

Matilde Cerruti Quara

Joseph Awuah-Darko

Alice Bucknell

Hala Alyan

Allison Grimaldi Donahue

James Notin

Sophie Jung

Nour Mobarak

bones tan jones

James Massiah

Sarah Johanna Theurer

Eileen Myles

Jahan Khajavi

Leah Abrams

Tomaso Binga

Noah Kulwin

hannah baer