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Semyon Khanin

Semyon Khanin is a Latvian artist and poet who writes in Russian. He’s a member of the art collective Orbita. The most important direction of his artistic practice is work with urban space. His first project in that area was a map of the non-existent Riga metro called “Riga Underground Subway”, which he imagined to connect movie theaters with cemeteries. Today, Khanin continues to work on the guerilla art project “Will the Corners Be Named?” The artist gives names to street corners and installs signs on corner houses.

“Corners” echoes some of Khanin’s other works, which create new environments for text to exist in. The artist gives everyday things a new function — a “delivery” of poetic text to the reader. The interactive low-tech object “Poetry-to-go”, for example, consists of a few pairs of flip-flops and an inkpad. The sandals leave traces of poetry: one imprint is the original text, and another is its translation.

The work “Poe3D” literally embodies the observation made by avant-garde Russian poet Daniil Kharms that “One should write poetry so that if you throw a poem at a window, the glass will shatter”. To begin, Khanin created his first spatial poem — metal tube-shaped words that intersected like a three-dimensional crossword puzzle. Then, he launched the Poe3D website, which allowed users to write similar 3D texts. One of the artist’s latest works is a personal musical instru-ment for poetic performances, which he calls the “khafon”.