Curating Art: Navigating Across Borders

Accelerator has a collaboration with the International Master’s Programme in Curating Art at Stockholm University. The students create events in connection to themes that Accelerator wishes to highlight in the exhibition programme. Curator for this event is Yuying Hu. In connection with Accelerator’s current exhibition, she will present a talk that centers around multilingualism, the interrelationship between language and society, and linguistic practices that initiate diverse societal changes. Johanna Gustafsson Fürst has in her exhibition Graft the Words, Whip My Tongue been concerned with themes such as monolingualism and its normative oppression, as well as multilingualism and its enriching potentiality. Borders between different languages embody a complex of power relations that are entangled with social, political, economic, and cultural realities in contemporary societal settings. The following questions will be discussed during the talk: How could we approach such existing power relations? What does it entail to be a bilingual/multilingual subject when navigating across these borders, for example, in the process of translation? In relation to that, translator Jennifer Hayashida and Associate Professor in Spanish Johan Järlehed will discuss how language in a broad sense interacts with social change processes, and how translation practice can be interpreted as an intervention towards the current monolingual reality. Participants: Jennifer Hayashida, poet, translator and visual artist Johan Järlehed, Associate Professor in Spanish Yuying Hu, curator Recorded May 6th 2020