EXHIBITION: THE STAMMERING CIRCLE

Faktura 10 and RIBBON International present The Stammering Circle, an exhibition that opens in Lviv at the Jam Factory Art Center on June 21, 2025.

The Stammering Circle, a distributed exhibition on view at locations throughout Lviv, addresses disruption as dysfluency—a “stammering” that makes room for the pause essential to the exhibition of art in the context of war. A noisy business, war is voluminous, invasive, and serially destructive. It intercepts the continuum of time, breaks our understanding of cause and effect, violently occupies the everyday, and challenges the basic tenets of existence.

What constitutes art in times of rupture? How is it possible to find refuge from war’s perpetual state of contingency to make room for creative reflection? What are the forms and expressions—beyond mourning, loss, and requiem—that seize on instability to make a generative space to create resonantly? The Stammering Circle, curated by Marta Kuzma, draws inspiration from the writings of Czernowitz-born Paul Celan to respond to these questions. The poet, who in the aftermath of the tragedy and trauma of World War II emphasized art’s need to roam in an “art-less, art-free manner,” enabling alternative routes of lived experience. Grappling with a way to position art following destruction and desecration, Celan adapted his own approach to form, content, texture, and sound to conceive a postwar composition interconnected with a darkness acknowledged by all. He drafted a manifesto for art that revolved around the search for a poetic space and language that is immaterial “yet terrestrial, as something circular that returns to itself across both poles while—ultimately finding … a meridian.” In this sense, the stammering serves as the resounding passage of rhythms and repetitions charting a new route, as one previously untaken.

The Stammering Circle encompasses the visual, the auditory, the performative, and the dialogic. The project embraces testimony, historical material, archival documentation, and myriad discussions that acknowledge the lived experience of war as posited within art production. At the same time, it reflects on the experience of those who have left, expatriated, or exiled themselves to constitute — as Celan writes in “The Meridian”— a relentless battle with placelessness.

The Stammering Circle is a project of Faktura 10, a core initiative of RIBBON International, curated by Marta Kuzma, Chief Curator and Artistic Director. The foundational sites of The Stammering Circle exhibition are the Jam Factory Art Center, Dim42 LPE “Lviv Radio”, and the Machine Hall of Lviv Polytechnic National University.

Artists:
Nobuyoshi Araki; Moyra Davey; Trisha Donnelly; Harun Farocki; Francisco Goya; Frederick Kiesler; Yana Kononova; Katya Kopeikina; Anna-Mariia Kucherenko; Clarice Lispector; Boris Mikhailov; Noel Nutels; Janina Pedan; Julie Poly; Charlotte Posenenske; R. H. Quaytman; Walid Raad; Oleksiy Radynski; Yaroslav Solop; The Center for Spatial Technologies; Gregori Warchavchik.

Further information: https://jamfactory.ua/en/projects/the_stammering_circle/#/about