Title: traNslatioNs - Understanding Misunderstanding
Venue: 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT Gallery 1 & 2
Dates: October 16 (Fri), 2020 - June 13 (Sun), 202
The exhibition "traNslatioNs - Understanding Misunderstanding", held by 21_21 DESIGN SIGH was curated by Dominique Chen, a informatics researcher. Just as its straight-forward title suggests, it is an exhibition about translation, yet not only in a linguistic sense but includes many other forms of translation.
Trans-port
As the audiences enter the exhibition, they would immediately confront confusing translation. The director's message combined separate words from different languages to form a complete text, impossible to comprehend for people who do not speak all of the languages. From here we entered the wonderland of translation. Following the director's message was a huge dark room with multi-screens translating various languages simultaneously, while finding connections and associations between languages. Translation in this piece has gone slightly further into the clues that language holds to human history and culture.
Found in Translation
Google Creative Lab + Studio TheGreenEyl + Dominique Chen "Found in Translation"
Stepping out of this room was an open hall where most of the works, more than twenty pieces, were exhibited. It is quite interesting, because unlike other exhibitions that hang works in the white cube and solemnly leave enough space for each works to be appreciated, this hall seemed rather tight and crowded. Artworks were close to each other and segregated simply by colored posts, and spectators can also approach them as closely as possible. The power dynamics between artworks and spectators subtly changed in this hall, mutual communication and interaction replaced the unidirectional system in which audiences are to worship and passively receive artworks. Since it was an open space, one can aimlessly wander among artworks, figuring out connections between artworks and piecing together the curator's interpretation of "translation".
Near the entrance of the hall were still works about language, but this time it was the untranslatability of languages, questioning whether translation itself is a pseudo-proposition. Ella Fances Sanders' Lost in Translation was a book illustrating world-wild expressions impossible to translate directly, Pei-Ying Lin's Unspeakableness invited trilingual and quadrilingual people to tell stories using mixed languages, resulting in extremely personalized languages undecipherable to anyone else.
What makes this exhibition so thought-provoking were the following themes on translation beyond language. Culture lies behind language, Kosuke Nagata's Translation Zone, Thinking about Translation Through Cooking probed into the subtleties untranslatable vacillating between cultures, such as how "fried rice" might be the same word but completely different food in different cultures.Theme two and three deal with the translation between senses and bodies, breaking boundaries. Tatsuya Honda's Ontenna converted sounds into vibrations, Natsumi Wada's Visual Creole tried to draw expressions with hands, and Watch / Feel / Experience Sports Matches translated sports matches for non-sighted people into other bodily senses. Art's imagination goes wildly over nowness and human. Artworks in theme 5 brought traditional Jomon elements buried in history to life within contemporary context. Ai Hasegawa and Špela Petrič quested for communication between animals, plants and human.
Institute for Inconspicuous Languages: Reading Lips, Spela Petric
"traNslatioNs - Understanding Misunderstanding" has offered many possible answers with artworks as to the question "What is Translation for you?", including but not limited to translation between languages, cultures, senses, times, and species. The research did not end as one stepped out of the exhibition and it extends. Art shops normally sell designed products from artworks exhibited, such as postcards, bags, and cups. It is not the same for this one. Visitors unexpectedly find books written by the director and artists, sense translation devices exhibited such as “Ontenna” and “Oton Glass”, games on body translations. The products served not as simple souvenirs but motives to encourage visitors to carry on the research by themselves. The exhibition just acted as a starting point that opened an on-going project about translation.
If we try to reflect on the notion "translation" again after the exhibition, it suddenly seems to be existing everywhere. One is doing translation speaking out the touch of the gentle breeze, smell of the grass, even the sight of sunshine with words, or visualizing the movement of wind and the flow of water through paintings of photographs. Translation is just like a constant flow and exchange of energy and senses between things.