Mirroring Language, Extended Dictionaries

“Mirroring Language, Extended Dictionaries” deals with the shifting of the Arabic cultural language inside the cultural field. The work concerns with the appearance of the phenomena / language within art publications issued by Arabic institutions that emerged in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa in the last decades. Therefore the project is researching the relationship between institutions and cultural production and how this relationship effects the production of language and strategies of publishing. The emphasis is on four points: bilingualism and institutions, translation and dictionaries making.

The work exposes a collection of bilingual art publications, an “Index of Terms” created by the translator Kamal Abu-Deeb for the Arabic translation of Edward W. Said’s “Orientalism” 1981 and “Culture and Imperialism” 1997. It explores historical experiences in Arabic cultural dictionaries making and proposes a dictionary on art writing and critics prepared by Fehras Publishing Practices.
At the exhibition “Something to Generate From” this work is a rereading, a reorganization and a re-positioning of discourses on knowledge and power and that on reality and fiction. The work is a poetical and historical journey through identity, language and art history of the eastern and western world whose complexed relationship is closely interweaved with the colonial history.

It was produced within the »Series of Institutional Terms« which observes and studies the shifts and changes in language within institutional cultural production. Within this series, historical and modern examples are retrieved from the context of translation, bilingualism, dictionary production, cultural institutions and book design. This research incorporates various forms such as essays, interviews, artistic works and research. These will be presented in exhibitions and symposium in collaboration with experts from other fields of knowledge, from culture, language and design.