Posts filed under 'art installation'

Residing in Language: On the Exhibit, “i write (in Vietnamese)”

November 29, 2021  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Phuong Anh

For those working in two languages, Vietnamese was a language of intimacy, while English was the language that liberated them to explore ideas.

In the multimedia exhibit, “i write (in Vietnamese),” held in Hanoi during March of 2021, a group of poets and artists grappled with the fraught nature of writing in Vietnamese through a series of multifaceted installations crossing between poetry, photography, and other forms of visual art. In this essay, the Vietnamese writer Phuong Anh reflects on the exhibit through conversations with the artists and their works to discover their relationship to the Vietnamese language, their experiences of living in multiple languages, and the significance of translation for both the artists and herself. 

What does it mean to reside in a language?

What does it mean to write in a language?

These two questions dance around in my mind, as I pen down letters with diacritics, forming monosyllabic words, known to me as “Vietnamese.” Although every now and again, words from other places are inserted. They mingle together and ring in my ear like soft lullabies. Yet, when it comes to defining what language they are, what literature they are, no labels have yet to satisfy me.

residing in language

“The unsendables,” Hương Trà & Kai, photograph by Bông Nguyễn

Such a dilemma is encapsulated in the title of the exhibition i write (in Vietnamese) that ran in March of 2021, right after the lift of Hanoi’s third lockdown. It took residence at first in the Goethe Institute before migrating to the Bluebird’s Nest Cafe. It was composed of a multimedia showroom, displaying the multifaceted nature of writing “in Vietnamese.” A label so constrained by past and current cultural politics, yet so liberating—a mini tug of war, echoed by the brackets, which both confine and protect the language.

The exhibition brings the creator and viewer closer to the process of art-making. For example, in Hương Trà and Kai’s project nếu có viết ra thì đây cũng là những lá thư mình không bao giờ gửi được | unsendables, viewers were invited to come, sit down, and write. In that room, there was a table on which there were two stacks of paper: one labelled “here are the letters that depart” and the other, “here are the letters that stay.” Those who chose the first stack could have their letters sent; while the writing of those who chose the latter “will never be able to be sent” and would remain forever with the exhibition. This project also connects languages not just through the bridge of translation but also by placing them within the same space: English and Vietnamese on one double-sided paper (chiếu|  |uềihc reflect|  |tcelfer), on a single page (where is my heart?; Journals to), or on the same line (slow dance in a burning room; skin.da). READ MORE…

The 24-Hour Language Experiment: Timothy Maxymenko’s US2

May 27, 2019  |  in Dispatches, Essays  |  by Debbie Kent

What would happen if two people who do not have a common language tried to communicate with each other for twenty-four hours?

On an evening in March this year, the door of an empty shop in Shoreditch, east London, opened for the first time in twenty-four hours. Inside, the white walls were covered with a jumble of apparently random words in different languages. This was not the work of kids practising their graffiti skills, nor a ritual summoning of dark forces by local satanists, but the culmination of a twenty-four-hour performance by two artists: Timothy Maxymenko and Iris Colomb, who had spent the time learning to communicate with each other through a simple set of rules before inviting the public to join a wider conversation about the work.

Maxymenko, who devised US2 and first staged a version of it in Kraków, is a Ukrainian artist based between London and Kiev; Colomb is a French artist, poet, curator, and translator. Between them, they speak several languages, with French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian forming parts of their word-by-word dialogue, although English predominated.

The initial idea for US2 came from Maxymenko’s experience while on an artist’s residency in Montenegro in 2016, when he was trying to talk to local people, who speak a variant of Serbo-Croatian. Having a knowledge of Slavic languages made things easier—Ukrainian is his mother tongue and he is also fluent in Russian and Polish: “Sometimes I had to choose the same word in different languages and adjust it, until the person I was talking to noticed the similarity in the root of the word. The more you know languages from one group, the easier it is to understand the others by collecting them like a puzzle.” This made him wonder what would happen if two people who do not have a common language tried to communicate with each other for twenty-four hours and how many words they would need. “Then I began to think about how to create all the necessary conditions for the experiment.” READ MORE…

Youmein Festival: Creating Art in the Liminal Space Between Tradition and Imitation

September 7, 2017  |  in Dispatches  |  by Alexander Jusdanis and Jessie Stoolman

“Is a society made up of endless imitations that become canonized as tradition? Or do traditions change through borrowing from other cultures?"

Diverse languages and artistic disciplines intersected at the Youmein Festival in Tangier where artists and writers from Morocco, Algeria, Spain, and France created pieces to reflect the interplay between tradition(s), taqalid, تقاليد, and imitation, taqlid, تقليد.. Asymptote’s Tunisia Editor-at-Large Jessie Stoolman and writer Alexander Jusdanis report from Tangier. 

For the past three years, Youmein (“Two Days” in Arabic) has brought together diverse artists in the city of Tangier to create art installations based on a central theme over a 48-hour period.

The festival is run by Zakaria Alilech, a translator and cultural events coordinator at the American Language Center (ALC) Tangier, George Bajalia, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Columbia University, and Tom Casserly, a production manager at Barbara Whitman Productions. They’re quick to emphasize their hands-off approach. “We’re not curators,” says Alilech. Instead, they see themselves as facilitators, providing artists the initial inspiration, space and support to realize their ideas. The trio stressed that Youmein is less about the final product and more about the process of making art.

They intend the festival to be an opportunity for the artists and audience to discover Tangier through the lens of each year’s theme. While strolling through the city’s streets, historically a meeting point for peoples from around the Mediterranean and beyond, it is not uncommon to hear any combination of Rifiya, Darija, Spanish, French, English, and Italian. Thus, it is perhaps unsurprising that language has played an essential role in selecting the theme of the Youmein festival from its inception.

READ MORE…