Premiere screening of the film Languages from Water and meeting with the creative team

event in english
translation at PJM — please submit your request to the address: at least one week before the event

The installation Languages from Water by Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski is presented in the Polish Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition in Venice until 22 November. In order to bring the project closer to the Polish public, we invite you to a series of meetings in Warsaw in autumn.

During the meeting with Delphine Grass, we will talk about translation and its apparent neutrality. Translation is not a simple transfer of meanings — it always co-creates differences between languages, cultures and worlds, and can thus both strengthen existing hierarchies and open up space for new communities. The source of our culture's phonocentrism is the belief that human phonic speech is the primary or highest pattern of communication, which has historically led to the marginalization of both sign languages and animal communication. It seems interesting, then, not so much to look for simple equivalents — for example, to ask whether animals have a language analogous to that of humans — but to think about how we can expand our own understanding of language and allow other, including other species, to communicate so that they can unseal our patterns of cognition.

Languages from Water is a project in which the social Choir in Movement, made up of hearing and deaf people, performs interpretations of communication codes and whale songs simultaneously in phonic English and international sign languages (IS), building visual-spatial-sound fantasies about their possible translations. Moving between human and non-human, phonic and visual languages, languages from water create a space “in between”, they are inherently fluid. Attempts at translation here become a performative act, a tool of the imagination, allowing us to question the anthropocentric perspective and encouraging a change in our ways of thinking about communication.

The meeting will be hosted by Yolanta Voshchenko, one of the curators of Languages from Water.

More about the interviewees:

Delphine Grass is a senior lecturer in French and comparative literature at Lancaster University, where she is the principal investigator of the Animals in Translation project. AI, Ethics and the Future of Interspecies Dialogue, funded by AHRC/BRAID. Her research focuses on the intersections of creative and critical practices in translation, environmental humanities and digital media. Her most recent publications include Translation as Creative-Critical Practice and Unending Translation. Creative-Critical Experiments in Translation and Life Writing (in print). She is a multilingual poet and translator.

Jolanta Voshchenko — co-curator of the exhibition Languages from Water. Curator of contemporary art, since 2008 associated with the Gdańsk Centre for Contemporary Art. She is interested in experimental forms of film and video, as well as communication processes, both between creator and recipient, as well as between different media and art disciplines.

More about Languages from Water: https://labiennale.art.pl/en/wystawy/jezyki-z-wody/

Text by Delphine Grass entitled Making a Common World. Languages from water and the radical art of intergenre translation can be found in the publication accompanying the exhibition Languages from Water.

The organizer of the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is Zachęta — National Gallery of Art.

The programme of events accompanying the exhibition Languages from Water was financed by the PKO Bank Polski Foundation.

Poland's participation in the 61st International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia is funded by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland:

Patron of the Polish Pavilion:

main partner of the exhibition:

partners of the exhibition:

supporting:

Media patrons: