Diamond without an r: Maria Barnas in Conversation with Rosemarie Buikema
In conversation with Maria Barnas
In 2011, Annet Gelink Gallery started a series called Conversation Pieces: video recordings of several artists in conversation with Dutch art historian and former director of the Stedelijk Museum Rudi Fuchs. Now, the series has been extended to artist talks between our artists and various inspiring sparring partners. On July 15th 2022, Rosemarie Buikema sat down with Maria Barnas at the Annet Gelink gallery in honour of the recent publication of Barnas’s new poetry collection entitled Diamant zonder r (or Diamond without an r). Maria Barnas (Hoorn, 28 August 1973) is an award-winning author, poet, and visual artist who places equal importance on text and imagery in her work.
Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery. Video (stills) by Katarina van den Brink.
Starting from Virginia Woolf’s observations about the links between visual art and literature, Rosemarie Buikema and Maria Barnas engage in a conversation about Barnas’s poetry and visual art. They explore the concept of ‘Ekphrasis’ (the literary act of describing visual artwork as vivid word-images), “trialogues”, and the meaning of (Polish) heritage in Barnas’s latest work. The poetry collection Diamond without an r plays with the connections between the visual and the fluidity of languages, and the way that this fluidity is tied to senses of belonging.
The choice of the space where the conversation piece takes place is deliberate: the Annet Gelink gallery also hosts Barnas’s current visual artwork entitled Things I Should Have Said (2021, shown at the top of this article). In this artwork, Barnas plays with the affective state of language felt in the body, formed in the mouth, yet still indistinguishable and pre-discursive.
Below, you can watch the Conversation Piece between Rosemarie Buikema and Maria Barnas. The second video contains a recitation of a selection of poems from Diamond with an R, with readings by Alara Adilow, Anne Vegter, Dorothé Orczyk and Menno Hartman.
Conversation Piece:
Readings:
Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery. Video by Katarina van den Brink.