VIDEO STILLS, SOPAY POST MODERN BATHWATER, 25 min., Sharjah Biennale 13, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, 2017
The film takes us to the not-so-distant future, to a language laboratory where researchers analyze human bodies – people who have fallen into a coma while reading bilingual art books.
It is a strange phenomenon that has led intellectuals, artists, curators, and exhibition visitors into physical paralysis and a coma. Attempting to track the phenomenon, researchers resort to a range of analytical procedures, with the presumption that the language of the books the afflicted bilingual bodies are reading causes the coma.
There are three procedures analyzing literacy memory of the body through which researchers attempt to understand the effect of this language on the body. Striving to produce effective outcomes, the researchers have equipped their laboratory with a range of work supplies, some dating back to the time when bilingual bodies were analyzed in different ways. Among these supplies are flasks of post-modern liquids, distributed according to emergency art terms; basins of fermenting images and book covers; notecards to organize the terms extracted from the bodies under analysis; and also logs with publication details of the books born by the bilingual bodies – the same books that caused their coma. The rest of the supplies include historical discoveries such as pages of glossaries and dictionaries, such as images that help to understand the bilingual bodies in a historical context of translation and the production of cultural glossaries.
Through an analytical laboratory process, the film studies the effect of bilingualism on cultural bodies, that begins with the bifurcation of the bilingual body and then leads to a coma. It traces the authority imposed by language – the construction of terms and institutions – on the cultural body and in turn the effect of language on artistic practice and art work
It is a strange phenomenon that has led intellectuals, artists, curators, and exhibition visitors into physical paralysis and a coma. Attempting to track the phenomenon, researchers resort to a range of analytical procedures, with the presumption that the language of the books the afflicted bilingual bodies are reading causes the coma.
There are three procedures analyzing literacy memory of the body through which researchers attempt to understand the effect of this language on the body. Striving to produce effective outcomes, the researchers have equipped their laboratory with a range of work supplies, some dating back to the time when bilingual bodies were analyzed in different ways. Among these supplies are flasks of post-modern liquids, distributed according to emergency art terms; basins of fermenting images and book covers; notecards to organize the terms extracted from the bodies under analysis; and also logs with publication details of the books born by the bilingual bodies – the same books that caused their coma. The rest of the supplies include historical discoveries such as pages of glossaries and dictionaries, such as images that help to understand the bilingual bodies in a historical context of translation and the production of cultural glossaries.
Through an analytical laboratory process, the film studies the effect of bilingualism on cultural bodies, that begins with the bifurcation of the bilingual body and then leads to a coma. It traces the authority imposed by language – the construction of terms and institutions – on the cultural body and in turn the effect of language on artistic practice and art work
