Webinar

Translating Worlds Exhibition: Retracing Connections between Medieval Literature and Contemporary Art

by Milan Vukašinović (Uppsala University)

“Translating Words Exhibition” Webinar Poster

Organised by the Centre for Medieval Arts & Rituals, University of Cyprus

04 April 2024, 16.30-17.30 EET

For registration and information, contact Andria Andreou [email protected]

Abstract

As a part of the research project “Retracing Connections: Byzantine Storyworlds in Greek, Arabic Georgian and Old Slavonic (c. 950–1100)” (https://retracingconnections.org/), Milan Vukašinović and the Istanbul-based curator Nilüfer Şaşmazer co-created a contemporary art exhibition entitled “Translating Worlds” focusing on issues of translation and travelling stories (https://retracingconnections.org/exhibition/). The exhibition, which took place at Depo (Istanbul) between November 2023 and January 2024, featured existing and new works from fifteen international artists, including paintings, drawings, embroideries, sculptures, video and audio installations, and a lecture performance. The exhibition was conceived not only as communication outlet for the project’s research results, but as an additional research activity that aimed to amend the inability of contemporary Translation Studies to account for all the meanings and practices of translation in the Middle Ages.

In this webinar, the academic and creative process behind the exhibition will be presented, along with the final artistic products and the intellectual contributions to the overall research project. Questions concerning the compatibility between translation studies, Byzantine and peri-Byzantine texts, historical processes, tavelling stories, trans-linguistic storyworlds and the medium of contemporary art will be addressed. In this multifaceted intersection, as will be shown, contemporary art became the venue for untranslatability, negotiating between the personal, the poetic and the political. As it encountered the composite Byzantine worlds, art elucidated transhistorical instances of co-creation and communal existence. At the same time, by reintroducing medieval texts into the exhibition’s physical space, the artists gave them new material, visual and auditive forms. In short, this collaboration probed the possibility of new secular rituals for premodern artistic productions, previously severed from their original ritual contexts through the intellectual practices of postmedieval, Western academia.

Translating Worlds Exhibition (artworks by: Cansu Çakar, Elsa Sahal, setareh fatehi, Fikos; photo: flufoto)

Translating Worlds Exhibition (artworks by: Annabelle Binnerts, Lucie Kamuswekera, Walid Siti; photo: flufoto)