Tolia Curriculum
Livia Polanyi, From Ordinary Language to Verbal Art
Thursday, June 11, 2026, 7 to 9 pm

This evening is devoted to Livia Polanyi’s lecture “From Ordinary Language to Verbal Art.” 

A commonplace way in which we use language—telling stories about experiences—is a highly complex activity, involving integrating knowledge of language with a sensitivity to deeply held cultural values. In this presentation, the linguistic and cultural constraints on the ordinary stories that ordinary people tell will be described. Building on this, and by probing how verbal art makes language strange by violating some of these constraints, we will speculate about how works of visual art inscribed with language can be even more compelling than either words or images alone. 

Livia Polanyi is a linguist who always did her own thing and was amazed that she got paid for it. She taught at several elite universities and worked at a few elite research labs and was a founding member of a Silicon Valley startup. She had a brief career as a performance artist in the Netherlands in the 1980s and did a gig at The Kitchen in the 20teens. She is the subject of a short film shot mostly aloft in a zeppelin in which she mentions woolly mammoths. She holds 22 US patents. She is very old and lives in the middle of the East River in NYC. She is rather bewildered by how it all turned out. 

The lecture will be conducted in English.

Tolia Curriculum is a project conceived by Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili, unfolding as a daily schedule of workshops, lectures, screenings, readings, and participatory formats for children and adults. In the lead-up to Figure of the Child, her largest exhibition to date, Astakhishvili opens her production and installation process to the public as she develops her work in situ.

Program Overview

Image
Tolia Astakhishvili, Tolia Curriculum, 2026, courtesy of the artist
Design: Syndicat