Lauren Crichton

Can a sculpture be a poem? Artist Saloua Raouda Choucair thought so. In the early 1960s, the Lebanese artist began creating what she called ‘sculptural poems’ using interlocking forms that could be rearranged in various formations. 'Poem of Nine Verses' is influenced by Sufi poetry, Islamic and modernist architecture, and geometric abstraction. Each aluminium piece of the sculpture can stand alone, like a verse in a poem, but also forms a unified structure. ✍️ The artist said , ‘The way I organise my sculptural poems is inspired by Arabic poetry. I wanted rhythm like the poetic meter, to be at once more independent and interlinked, and to have lines like meanings.’ 📍 See the sculpture on free display at #TateModern! 🧱 Saloua Raouda Choucair, Poem of Nine Verses 1966–8

Buenos Aires #notestostrangers pic by @hell__hanna

“Our point is that you can you spend your whole life keep breaking on through. You can’t just break on through once and think, well, I’ve made it, I broke through. There’s a million membranes to break through. There’s a million places to go. You know. You move to another direction, another dimension. Big deal. We went to the moon, big deal. We went to Mars. Big deal. We keep moving and moving and moving. It’s just like going through one door. One door isn’t enough. A million doors aren’t enough. You have to go beyond. Beyond one reflection. Beyond the mirror, beyond, beyond.” ✨ - Patti Smith @thisispattismith Full interview can be watched on YouTube: ”Patti Smith - Interview, Stockholm October 1976”