Derya Vural and Maja Jantar

Derya Vural

So mindlessly

As Derya explained before, her calendar project is a record of visual poetry 'days.' So I figured if there was one day whose associations I might understand even though I have never met Derya in person, it would be November 4th 2008. I found a black circle and three white K's; my friend Magali found the stars and stripes. I like the green patches on there too...

Here are two other individual poems from the series:


the last rebellion against the grey

without 'where' and'why'

Maja Jantar


Maja exhibited different work this time. Since we weren't allowed to hammer nails into the walls of the Zilverhof, it would have been too difficult to hang the Marilyn series she exhibited in Brussels. This series is made of bamboo leaves in translucent rice paper, and is inspired by Chinese characters. I felt that it resonated in certain ways with Jessica Smith's veils on the other side of the room.

Derya Vural

Calendar Project




"We determine and count time with the help of repetitive sky events. A day means the time between the rising of the sun twice. We name it according to the instruments we have. In 2008 I named time according to the rising of visual poetry. A visual poetry day means the time between two visual poems. All the things I have lived, seen, exposed, witnessed, thought and not thought have turned into a visual poem on a page of the calendar. "

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Derya Vural was born in 1974 in Germany. She lives in Istanbul and works as a child psychologist and addiction consultant. She is interested in modern/contemporary visual arts, maths and motor-sports. Her visual poems have been published at Zinhar/Poetikhars (Turkish visual poetry website/magazine) and at www.391.org, and exhibited at the Asian visual poetry exhibition in Russia since 2005. She continues to publish visual poems on her personal website.

First pictures

I know you all need to see what we’ve done with your work but I’m going to post the photos gradually, taking my time to get a good photo of each piece. In the meantime a couple of general pics…



I went to Brussels with my Krikri colleague Maja Jantar on Monday to set everything up. Maja is an absolute genius when it comes to adapting a space, and I am so grateful to her for the hard work and huge quantities of inspiration she has put in this week. I’m not sure if the photos entirely reflect the way the two huge cardboard boxes open up the space and change it from a cramped rectangle into a garden of echoing lines. They also provide extra surfaces for exhibiting work, and something eye-catching to entice people into the room. The boxes are courtesy of Thomas, who scoured Antwerp’s music shops for big instrument boxes and went to unbelievable lengths to get them to us in time, and also gave us the idea of using them this way (he did something similar at the Krikri 2006 festival).

The positioning of Derya’s series make the height of the room more manageable and echo angela rawlings’ work across the room, as well as Suzan’s series down the side of the larger box; Angela Szczeapaniak’s red mounting boards resonate with the red floor tiles and the red background to angela’s series; the shape of the boxes work with the covered blackboard, which we couldn’t take down from the wall. Moniek’s big plastic domes covering her work, and the glass dome we used to keep Michelle’s tiny objects safe, take some of the solidity and squareness out of the surroundings, as do Jessica’s veils with the lamp behind them. One visitor described the space as ‘Zen,’ which it certainly wasn’t when we arrived there on Monday morning.