September 17 to December 11
Surrey Art Gallery
13750 - 88 Avenue
Surrey, British Columbia
The late Mexican poet Octavio Paz called translation the “art of shadows and echoes,” and the “art of finding correspondences.” Translation is an activity that is central to global communication and cross-cultural understanding in the world today. Likewise the act of translation across media, and across cultural traditions, has been fundamental to art-making for centuries. With the rise of new technological media in contemporary art, and the acceleration of globalization, translation has become a key subject of artists at the beginning of the new century.
This exhibition features artwork by Vancouver-based Digital Natives, Kitchener-based Soheila K. Esfahani, Mark Neufeld from Winnipeg, Emilio Rojas from Vancouver, Toronto-based Tony Romano, and Ming Wong from Berlin.
Among the works in Finding Correspondences is Ming Wong’s video installation In Love for the Mood (2009), in which the original actors of Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 film In the Mood for Love are replaced by a Caucasian actress from New Zealand studying in Singapore. This actress attempts to recreate the original film’s emotional power by speaking the parts of two separate characters in Cantonese. Her three separate deliveries of the scene’s lines point to the aspect of performance that is so critical to speaking in a foreign language.
Tony Romano’s Imagine Band (2009) uses the lyrics from John Lennon’s Imagine that have been translated by ten professional translation services through ten different foreign languages and back into English, with the new English version recorded on a 45 record, performed by the artist.
Another project, titled Digital Natives (2011), looks at translation between local first nations languages (Musqueam, Kwak’wala, Squamish, Tatlan, and Thompson) and several settler languages (English, French, and Cantonese) that had originally been generated in Twitter on a public electronic billboard, but is now resituated in the gallery.
