Translation ⓘ

Author: Rachel Anne Farquharson

By presenting the narrative of stasis in cinematic form John Monteith complicates his audience's response to the biological, political, and social aspects of time and space. The process used to create And So It Is, a 16mm film work composed of 100 layered still images projected in a continuous loop, transforms clean, still moments into visually noisy, obscured surveillance. Still though these images may be, the whir of the projector indicates a reel in motion — a noise which, to Roland Barthes, indicates time's forward pointing arrow.

The material aspects of the film expose a strange truth about a political and social condition peculiar to present day North Korea and the later part of its twentieth century history — balanced poised on the shoulders of their departed leader, Kim Il Sung. Where the physical body and sound of the film suggest progression in time, the still image meeting the viewers' eye brings into high relief an unchanged architectural, and social moment. Identifying this current year as year 101, a dating system recalibrated to the date of Kim Il Sung's birth, the apparatus of the state is remarkably contingent on an enduring bond between citizen and absent leader, entrapping the landscape in a vacuum of time and space.

It is this disparity in societal homeostasis that Monteith aims to translate. Original digital images are given volume when turned into film, a transubstantiated body which translates the foreign social and ideological landscape of North Korea into an accessible image. Simultaneously the banality of the city and landscape that the artist photographs become monumentalized and this estrangement amplifies the ritualism intrinsic to this society.

Author: Rachel Anne Farquharson

Ng co-ordinates an interest in familial lineage, as well as archives and artefacts, with the pursuit of human's inclination to monumentalize or aggrandize these objects. In Heirloom Facsimile, a tri-part series of tapestry works based on a government-issued document first possessed by the artist's grandmother, Ng explores not only the physical journey artefacts take as they are passed between relatives, but also the way that propagandistic language and concepts translate between Eastern and Western schools of thought.

The documents materialized in Heirloom Facsimile originated in China and were issued by an apparently governmental body called the Hong Kong Administrative Unit. The texts begin in Chinese, but transition to English half way through. The content of the document regards the nature of cancer and advises on preventative measures largely based in Eastern Medicine. The language used, which was most likely intended to be convincing, reads much like the chain-letter vernacular that many North Americans may be familiar with. Heirloom Facsimile enables viewers not only to consider the way the Chinese approach cancer — for example, it is widely held that while everyone gets cancer eight or nine times in their life, it can be resolved through diet and holistic care — but also the way more remote societies choose to disseminate information in comparison to Western medical/governmental/social communities. Heirloom Facsimile therefore involves a translation of sorts, or a reframing of what we are encountering to fit within the confines of our own terms.

The document was faxed by Petrina Ng's grandmother to her father from China, the process giving the page quite a bit of visual noise. From there, Ng's father scanned each page and emailed them to the artist. Ng printed the facsimiles on A4 paper, the customary size in the UK, blew each up to A0 (4x), creating templates or cartoons for her cross-stitch tapestries. The enlarging process pixelated the text and so each pixel is translated into one cross-stitch. The material process of information transfer, from b/w fax, to colour scan, to b/w print, to b/grey on white embroidery mimics the transformation through which the subject-object relationship goes as the audience experiences the work. The document is translated from 2-D to 3-D. From code to body, as if by transubstantiation. From propaganda to monument. In other words, the form of the work serves as a physical metaphor for the way in which we must translate the work's content in order to understand it. Ng translated government-issued nonsense into a keepsake and legacy artefact. A fac-simile: not a fact but a fax (a slant rhyme) and a simile, which is a "like" or "as" — not an "is." The word play here, calling into question the veridical identity of the document, also gestures towards the ultimate impossibility to archive something legitimately. The ultimate failure of the archive.

Personal dimension: Medical translation between western empirical treatment and more suspect eastern remedy has been mediated by Ng's personal experience with cancer. Subjective experience can transform even the most propagandistic notions into truths. This body of work has perhaps enabled the artist to better understand how life experiences translate into knowledge and behaviour — how the initial work of an artist reflects a one-to-one relationship whereas a mature artist gestates and processes thoughts, going beyond self-interested manifestations. This is related to Freud's stages of development and understanding immediate sensory perception versus knowing what senses can exist beyond what is being felt at the time.