MONOCULTURE | Een recent verhaal

Title: From the fraying edges

Whilst societies presenting as ‘multicultural’ may superficially operate with an authoritative lingua franca; kinship and commonality often remain artificial and precarious. In her seminal writings of the late 1980s/early ‘90s, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, stressing the limits of language to translate meaning, reasoned that rhetoric exists in the silence between and around words, in the fraying edges of language. The works of artists such as Christian Nyampeta and Wu Tsang, among others, play out in the intimacies of this disjuncture. If, as Spivak asserts, translation is the most intimate act of reading, far from this being a translatory defeat, it is within these chasms of interpretation, where meaning remains malleable and unconfined, that the empathetic agency of the receiver is called to action. This presentation looks at the contemporary subaltern voice, exploring aesthetic ‘translatese’ as a space of productive potential that might offer a way to navigate our messy, blurred and unconcluded sense of being.

Bio: Sophie J. Williamson is Programme Curator (Exhibitions) at Camden Arts Centre, London, where she has presented the first major UK exhibitions of artists such as Kara Walker, Moyra Davey, Ben Rivers, Geta Brătescu and Vivian Suter, amongst many others. From 2009–13, she was part of the inaugural team at Raven Row, London, and previously worked on the Singapore Biennale (2006), Venice Biennale (2007) and Asia Manchester Triennial (2008). Her writing has appeared in frieze, Art Monthly and Aesthetica, and was the Gasworks Curatorial Fellow (2016). Her recent anthology, Translation (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press) brings together writings by artists, poets, authors and theorists to reflect on the urgency of building empathy in an era of global turmoil. She is currently a Curatorial Fellow at Banff Arts Centre, Canada, as part of a year-long sabbatical developing this research further.