Alicja Rose

5 p.m. 30th December, 2014 Alicja Rose (Poland) presents illustartion exhibition “Hyperborea” at KKKC Exhibition hall.

HYPERBOREA (English and German) / HIPERBOREA (Polish) / HIPERBORĖJA (Lithuanian) / ГИПЕРБОРЕ́Я (Russian)

We would like to present illustrations to poems written by poets who are connected with Klaipeda, it’s the hometown of Gintaras Grajauskas and Rolandas Rastauskas and birth place of Tomas Venclova.

Greeks called people from the North that is from Thrace, Hyperboreans – these were mythical people who lived “beyond the North Wind”. Boreas was the god of North Wind. We might imagine now they meant a severe land, but in fact it was the most precious and sunny place ever. To these mythical people refers himself Gintaras Grajauskas in his poem A Quaint Complaint in the Land of Hyperboreans (Santaliučija hiperborėjų krašte). How dare you complain about a paradise? The paradise from the poem seems to be a miserable place. Maybe Hyperborea is located in fact in the Baltic region. This is the true homeland of the Boreas. What if Odyseus had travelled way up here? And Francesco Guardi had come to paint Klaipeda instead of Venice?

Author of the illustrations took inspiration from the nearby surroundings and Curonian Spit landscape as well as our common Baltic history. All the elements of the illustrations come either from real life or from historical photographies taken here. It doesn’t seem like a miserable place at all: it’s beautiful, rich nature and kind hearted people make it all together a place where art and thought may grow. But it’s not / easy to die, even here.

Alicja Rosé (b. 1982) is a poet, essayist, translator and illustrator. She has been publishing in Zeszyty Literackie, Gazeta Wyborcza, Kultura Liberalna, Dwutygodnik.com. She runs her own poem in translation column Między wersami (Between Verses) in Kultura Liberalna. Recently Alicja has illustrated a book on a Polish writer and poet Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (Spotkać Iwaszkiewicza. Nie-biografia., Wilk&Król, Warszawa 2014) and a book about women who loved writers, that is Nadiezhda Mandelshtam, Sophia Tolstoy, Anna Iwaszkiewicz and Maria Kasprowicz (One. Kobiety, które kochały pisarzy,  Wilk&Król, Warszawa 2014.).

Exhibition runs until February 1^st 2015.