What gets lost in a translation? What can we learn from unsaid things?
And how is that silenced shaped? What do forgotten words, books, libraries and archives still tell us? Can we liberate ourselves from assumptions and pose questions instead?
Inez Piso is a curator and translator who graduated with a bachelor's degree in Art History from the University of Amsterdam and a Master’s degree from the Universidad Autónoma Madrid. After working four years in the CA2M, Madrid, she moved to Istanbul where she participated in the IKSV Research Programme with the HüzünProject in 2018. She worked for After the Archive? an initiative that gains attention to silenced archives and questions the role of archives in the creation of public memory in Turkey. She likes to curate exhibitions in unexpected spaces, like an archival box that once belonged to Ulises Carrión: No Todo ~ Niet Alles or the public ferry that crosses the waters of Amsterdam for the Amsterdam Ferry Festival. At the end of 2021 she became the artistic director of HMK: an exhibition space an artist-in-residence programme located in a 17th century chapel.
She is teaches for the MA programme F for Fact at the Sandberg Institute and the Language and Image Department at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She is also a teacher at the Fine Arts Bachelor programme at Minerva Art Academy in Groningen. Although her practice is about things that cannot be said with words, she sometimes writes for art magazines like Mister Motley. She is continuously bridging cultural and geographical spaces with her interests in language and translation.
Silent Language
Circuit Istanbul
What gets lost in translation, where does it go?
Inez Piso is interested in that which gets lost in translation. Meanings disappear into silence. Whenever we choose to say something, there are always things we are not saying: every language consists of words as much as silences.
Language is a vehicle for organising our thoughts. But as a consequence it might also limit the way we think. It affects our perception of gender roles by assuming a certain division. All other categories are left unsaid and thereby automatically silenced.
We will discuss how these problems manifest themselves in different languages and see how the evolution of a language mirrors the evolution of a culture. Moreover, we will analyse how we are using language today, what assumptions can be questioned and how this can be used as an agent of change.
Part of the 4th edition of Eylem Külübü:
Eylem Külübü
Ortega y Gasset, Miller, Foz, Furlan, Bezerra
Miseria y Esplendedor de la Traducción, Scientia Traductionis, n.13, 2013
Ignasi Aballí
Wrong colors, 2018
Corrector Typpex on mirror
100 x 100 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
In collaboration with Peachy Works and Circuit Istanbul