Underskog

PRAKSIS is delighted to invite Smadar Deyfus to lead its Winter 2016 residency in Oslo. Applications are now being accepted from international, national and local participants for an arts based residency on the theme of Cultural Mistranslations running from 1 – 30 November 2016.

THE RESIDENCY THEME //

We live in a condition of cultural translation – between migrations, occupations and multiple inhabitations. Like Vilém Flusser’s exile, we must “process” the data, as a matter of survival. Flusser tells us that this “data transformation is a synonym for creation”, so that the exile becomes “a catalyst for the synthesis of new information”.

Cultural translation is never literal: this ‘data transformation’ doesn’t involve the direct transfer of meaning. Instead, we think of translation as different sensitivities and mingled ambiences. It emerges as a field of partial meanings, sounds, smells and dissonant textures. This understanding of translation has a potential to open up practices that go beyond cultural representation.

One productive aspect of this field could be what Sarat Maharaj has called “creative mistranslation”: the idea that (mis)translation can create a surplus of meaning that generates a new consciousness, even a “transfiguration”. Art, as a domain for the displacement and circulation of meaningful objects, is the field where cultural mistranslations become a productive force, a breeding ground for hybridity and new cultural configurations.

This interdisciplinary residency will explore the potential of translation and mistranslation in the context of displacement (of objects, sounds, ideas, as well as of people). How does one culture play a role in another culture? And what happens when the products of creative mistranslation are brought back to the scene of ‘expulsion’?

ABOUT SMADAR DREYFUS //

Smadar Dreyfus’s projects excavate scenes of everyday life for reverberations of a wider socio-political context. Focusing in particular on the role of the voice in the enactment of contested public spaces, she uses documentary recordings gathered over long periods of research. Her video and sound installations consist of specific architectural enclosures, designed to immerse viewer-listeners in affective soundscapes, raising questions about communication and translation across cultural and political divides. Writing on the installation Mother’s Day at Extra City, Antwerp, Doreen Mende has observed how Dreyfus“modestly yet decisively conveys a vivid sense of how politics and the burden of history affect the lives of individuals in our present-day realities”.

Dreyfus’s selected solo exhibitions include: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 2014, Magasin III, Stockholm 2009, Extra City, Antwerpen 2008, IKON Birmingham 2005 and Victoria Miro, London 2006. Selected group exhibitions include the 2011 Folkestone Triennial, S.M.A.K. Gent 2010, Mediations Biennial, Poznan 2010, ArTLV Biennale, Tel Aviv 2009, MUSAC Leon, Spain 2006, and the 9th Istanbul Biennial, 2005.

Examples of work by Dreyfus can be found here.

More information about the residency and PRAKSIS can be found here