ONLINE Workshop: Artist as Translator

This online workshop is led by Second Practice, a collaborative research practice by Fatima Hussain, Abeerah Zahid,and Ayesha Kamal Khan, unpacking knowledge production and dissemination within postcolonial geographies and diasporic contexts.

The workshop will examine the role of the artist as a cross-cultural, cross-sensory, linguistic translator.

—

The Artist as Translator is a practice-led research project that aims to stretch visual vocabularies and find systems to address the materiality specific to a location. This research is an extension of the assumption that at the core of any creative practice lies first, a sincere translation of an observation in the producer’s choice of medium. This makes the producer or the artist primarily a translator before anything else who truly believes in the impossible translatability of in/tangible materials that they interact with.

While the project looks at identifying the nucleus and finding versions of it in translations across multiple geographies, we are interested in also mapping the ways in which translation occurs or happens. For this, we use the workshop space to engage with varied sets of audiences to arrive at multiple methods of translation. This workshop will use cross-sensory, cross-cultural, linguistic, and visual methods to prompt the participants. Mapping of these methods will be built into the workshop design.

This project has been realised in collaboration with VASL Artist Association and generously supported by Living Arts International under the South-South Arts Fellowship 2022.

—

About Second Practice

Second Practice is a collaborative research practice by Fatima Hussain, Abeerah Zahid, and Ayesha Kamal Khan unpacking knowledge production and dissemination within postcolonial geographies and diasporic contexts. Exploring trans-disciplinary methodologies in artistic practice, critical inquiry of how the local is often flattened in the global art world, and participatory ways of disseminating knowledge, Second Practice draws out considered positions in formats predisposed to sharing and circulation.

In the recent past, they did a year-long research project ‘Access Audience / Audience Access’ supported by LBF-AAN, the project acquired the format of a live archive and a publication in response to locating audiences for contemporary arts in Pakistan. Second Practice also visualized and produced a short film on the temporal experiences of migrants for an ERC-funded project based at the University of Delft, NL. The film was shown at the 17th Istanbul Biennale.

—

This event is part of Still there are seeds to be gathered … a programme of events led by EOP members.