Poet Slash Artist review – if this show is art’s future, it looks good to me

Home, Manchester
A show about the relationship between seeing and reading feels like a return to romanticism – a belief in the passionate expression of the spirit

Poets and artists have been influencing each other ever since the Renaissance versifier Angelo Poliziano said to Sandro Botticelli: “Why not do a painting about spring?” At least that is a Eurocentric way of looking at it. One of the first things you notice in Poet Slash Artist at the Manchester international festival is that few cultural traditions distinguish word and image as starkly as the west. In classical Chinese, Arabic and Persian poetry, calligraphy connects the verbal and visual in ways that make poetry and art practically the same thing.

That way of seeing words is remade for today by Imtiaz Dharker in her captivating drawing My Breath. Stripes flow magically out of her body into space. The lines continue their journey through a second picture, then in the third become words, lines of poetry repeated, repeated, repeated through entire blocks of text.

Poet Slash Artist is at Manchester international festival until 18 July.