LAVENDER LANGUAGES INSTITUTE: Yevgeniy Fiks “Poetry of the Queer International”, 25 January, 2023, 7pm

For the closing event of Lavender Languages Institute program at the lecture-performance artist Yevgeniy Fiks will discuss two of his recent books “Mother Tongue” and “Dictionary of the Queer International”. “Mother Tongue” is a project “about” and “in” the Soviet-era Russian gay argot/defense language. “Tematicheskiy” language (the language for those “in the know”) is treated as a complete, self-sufficient, and distinct language, separate from the standard Russian. The book “Dictionary of the Queer International” proposes a vision of international, intersectional, and non-hierarchical queer culture via imaginary queer defense fusion-language. The dictionary is a collection of words and phrases from local queer languages around the world. The event will also include reading of conceptual poetry that Fiks wrote in the Soviet-era Russian gay argot and in the Language of the Queer International.

Lecture-performance will take place at Pickle Bar and online. Yevgeniy Fiks will be reading lecture online while live poetry reading, snacks and drinks will take place at Pickle Bar.  

With participation of Giorgi Rodionov for the poetry reading of Queer International at Pickle Bar.

Language: English.

Free admission. Registration for the online participation is HERE.

Yevgeniy Fiks works build on research into Cold War narratives to explore the dialectic between Communism and “the West,” addressing the Red and Lavender Scares during the McCarthy era, Communism in Modern Art, and African, African American, and Jewish diasporas in the Soviet Union. 

Giorgi Rodionov is an artist and a curator based in Berlin and Tbilisi.  A founder of an art space UNTITLED TBILISI which collects artists from the Caucasus region to use art as the space for promoting women, queer, and ethnic minority rights.