Research Catalog

Kissing through a curtain.

Title

Kissing through a curtain.

Publication

North Adams, MA : MASS MoCA, 2021.
©2021

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	N6505 .K57 2021g	Off-site

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Description

203 pages : color illustrations; 27 x 24 cm

Summary

Kissing through a Curtain addresses the brief, mediated, and imperfect nature of the act of translation, including work by an international group of artists who examine our attempts to communicate across and despite apparent borders. "We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. Whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly" --Ken Liu. Kissing through a Curtain takes its title from the essay "Translation: Better Than Never Kissing at All II" by poet Kwame Dawes, in which he recounts hearing another writer speaking about how Russian verse fell flat when translated into English because, taken out of its original context, its rhyming and meter seem stilted. "How," she asked. "Would you like to be kissed through a curtain?" to which someone in the group quipped, "Better than not kissing at all." Including works by Nasser Alzayani, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Kim Faler, Justin Favela, Osman Khan, Christine Sun Kim, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jimena Sarno, Clarissa Tossin, and Jessica Vaughn.
The ten contemporary artists in this exhibition address boundaries, and attempts to communicate across them: not just between different languages, but also between nations, cultures, media, bodies, and individual minds. Their work invites us to consider moments of mediated contact, and uncertain communication, as potential sites for the generation of new knowledge. We installed this exhibition before MASS MoCA temporarily closed its doors to the public due to COVID-19: before interactions took place through masks and digital screens; before countries' borders were locked down still further; before the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police, and numerous other acts of anti-Black violence, sparked a new wave of protests around the United States and the world. In some ways, the exhibition is already the type of work that MASS MoCA, as a contemporary art museum, does not usually show: a piece of history. And yet, many of the questions asked here feel even more urgent today than they did months ago. Borders--and the ways that they differentiate one group from another--are hotly contested. Is the act of translation a way of reaching across borders and forging new connections, or is it another form of appropriation and colonization? How do we mourn in the mediated and highly partisan "togetherness" of social media? If communication from one context to another is always imperfect, why do we attempt it at all? --Exhibition website

Subject

Genre/Form

Exhibition catalogs.

Note

Catalog of the exhibition "Kissing through a Curtain" held at MASS MoCA July 11, 2020-October 31, 2021

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 190-191).

Contents

Introduction / Joseph Thompson -- How to kiss through a curtain : on navigating translation and borders in contemporary art / Alexandra Foradas -- A manifesto for ultratranslation / Antena Aire -- Borders, both allegorical and physical / Aslı Çavuşoğlu, interviewed by Alexandra Foradas -- Language is migrant / Cecilia Vicuña -- Stills from close readings / Christine Sun Kim -- You got to make your own worlds (for when Siri is long gone) / Clarissa Tossin -- Stills from Taracatá Trabaja / Jimena Sarno -- A score for feral translation / Kameelah Janan Rasheed -- The bookmaking habits of select species / Ken Liu -- Almost/Nearly / Kim Faler -- Watering the distant, deserting the near / Nasser Alzayani -- Drone score / Osman Khan -- Plates : installation views -- A selected bibliography on translation and borders / Kat Chavez, Alexandra Foradas, and Eliza Harrison -- Exhibition checklist -- Bios -- Acknowledgments.

Call Number

N6505

ISBN

9780982991459
0982991452

OCLC

1280409206
on1280409206
SCSB-14407076

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries