Reading and conversation with Volha Hapeyeva (in German)

Poetry in exile

The title of the exhibition sometimes i hold onto the air comes from a poem by the Belarusian poet Volha Hapeyeva, who is living in exile in Germany. In her essay The Defense of Poetry in Times of Permanent Exile, she invokes poetry and art as a means of free thought and resistance against the bureaucratic language of states and dictatorial violence. At the exhibition, she will read from her poetry collection Trapezherz and talk about writing in exile.

Volha Hapeyeva, born in Minsk (Belarus), is a poet, author, translator and holds a PhD in linguistics. She has received numerous prizes and awards for her work, most recently the English PEN Translates Award for the book In My Garden of Mutants (2021) and the Wortmeldungen Literature Prize (2022). In 2022/2023 Volha Hapeyeva was a fellow of the DAAD Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program. In 2023/2024 she received the Clara and Eduard Rosenthal literary scholarship. Her poems have been translated into more than 15 languages. The poetry collection My Garden of Mutants (2020), the novel Camel Travel (2021), the essay In Defence of Poetry in Times of Permanent Exile (2022), the poetry book Trapezherz (2023) and the novel Samota. Loneliness lived in the room opposite (2024).