The piece Translator is a result of the ‘34th Outdoor Meeting for Artists Using the Language of Geometry’ curated by Bozena Kowalska at the Centre for Contemporary Art “Elektrownia” in Radom, Poland. At this international gathering of artists, most participants spoke either German or Polish and there was a translator there to assist. The hired translator was operating within those two languages but also offered more, like his personal remarks, his own interpretation of artists words and at some point he even started to dominate the discourse and to demand a certain behavior. This raises questions about the agency of the translator and how meaning is generated through subjective interpretation, how much one can deviate from the translatable ‘facts’ for the sake of ‘understanding’. The piece Translator is about this experience of translation, of words but also in a broader sense. It asks what is lost and what is gained in this process of translating and interpreting between languages, cultures and experiences. The piece consists of two parts: one is an aluminum frame painted black or white, the other a circle painted directly on the wall with soft edges that changes every time the work is shown in a different place.
Recent Comments