grazerkunstverein

(Performance)

2019: an endurance

Ariana Reines

13/09/2024, 18:00

2019 was a transformative and tumultuous year for Ariana Reines. After seven years of dedicated work, her ambitious writing project culminated in the publication of A Sand Book, a 400-page poetry epic, which concludes in a theophany with the sun. Like an enraged Demeter, or a Persephone in denial, Reines had given up her Queens apartment to save her mom from the streets, dragging her in-progress manuscript around the world in a glorified homelessness the contemporary artworld might more politely call “a busy career.” She spoke to strangers and to TV audiences, unintentionally accumulated a colorful array of lovers, enrolled at Harvard Divinity School, and generally lived “as variously as possible” — to quote Frank O’Hara — in the many ways she is known for: connecting cosmic and private dimensions in the most public and touching way, teaching, analyzing ancient texts, reading stars, appearing on TV and recreating in real time what a poet can be.

In her poetry and public performances, Reines strives to communicate with intelligence and spontaneity, channeling her words directly from the heart. Or in her own words: “Our hearts were the bombs whose threat never withdrew.” For 2019: an endurance, Ariana Reines will delve into the profound experiences that shaped her transformative 2019 and explore where those currents have carried her since. The event promises to be a free-flowing improvisation, combining the insights of deep meditation with a direct encounter with the audience.






ARIANA REINES is a poet, playwright, and performing artist from Salem, Massachusetts and based in New York. Her books include The Rose (forthcoming, 2025), Wave of Blood, A Sand Book—winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Award and longlisted for the National Book Award—Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize from Fence in 2006. Her Obie-winning play Telephone was commissioned by the Foundry Theatre with a sold-out run at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2009. Reines has created performances for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Swiss Institute, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, Le Mouvement Biel/Bienne, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Performance Space New York. She has taught poetry at UC Berkeley (Holloway Poet), Columbia, NYU, and Scripps College (Mary Routt Chair), been a visiting critic at Yale School of Art, and for community organizations including the Poetry Project and Poets House. Her poetry and prose have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, Artforum, Frieze, Harper’s, and many others. In 2020, while a Divinity student at Harvard, Reines created Invisible College, an online space devoted to the study of poetry, sacred texts, and the arts.

01Ariana Reines. Photo: Collier Schorr