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

Language. We live together with others embedded in our words, the words of others and the words that echo to us from other times and other places. Telling ordinary stories in ordinary situations we rely upon deep linguistic, social and cultural practices to reproduce experience in ordinary unremarkable ways. In this performance, the body, image and voice of old woman, young woman, professor and poet explore the constraints that shape conversational storytelling, the nature of verbal art, and the power of assemblage when visual art is the canvas where captured bits of language come to rest.

Livia Polanyi is a poet and a linguist who became a linguist because she was a poet. She 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 by her beloved son shot mostly aloft in a zeppelin in which she mentions wooly mammoths. She holds 22 US patents. She is very old and lives and writes 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 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