Works by institute for incongruous translation and Sophia Al Maria. Photograph: Marc Domage. The name Qalqalah comes from two short stories by Egyptian curator and researcher Sarah Rifky [1].
The eponymous heroine of these works of fiction, Qalqalah, is an artist and linguist who inhabits a near future reconstructed by the financial crisis and the popular revolts of the s. Her poetic meditations on languages, translation, and their critical and imagining power accompanied our reflections, and have stayed with us ever since. Qalqalah became an online research platform involving three languages Arabic, French and English and two alphabets. It is now taking the form of an exhibition.
In Monolingualism of the Other [2] , the philosopher, born in in Algeria, writes of his ambiguous relationship with the French language, ensnared in military and colonial history.
These three languages and more will come together in the exhibition, each bringing its own political, historical and poetic issues that intersect and respond to one another.
The works echo multiple, hybrid languages, acquired in the course of family migrations, personal exile or uprooted encounters. Native, secondary, adoptive, migrant, lost, imposed, common, minor, invented, pirated, contaminated languages… How do we speak to each other in more than one language, using more than one alphabet? How do we listen from within the place and language in which we find ourselves?
