2015
single channel video (34 minutes and 7 seconds)
This video work sees a fictional amateur linguist conduct a telephone study of the ’Englishes’ spoken in the remotest corners of the globe. Through a series of fractured phone conversations he uses notation in IPA (international phonetic alphabet) to collect fragments of their pronunciation.
This work was produced by the Salonul de Proiecte in Bucharest. The phone interviews were conducted by Voicu Radescu.
2014
single channel video (4 minutes and 41 seconds)
This short video consists of an audio track alongside a projection of subtitles in International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA), a notation system for every sound that any human can make in speech.
The system is largely attributed to phonetician Daniel Jones – after whom playwrite Bernard Shaw famously modeled the character of Henry Higgins. Jones initiated a yearly Summer Course of English Phonetics that still brings large groups of scholars from all over the world to the UCL in London. In 2014 Nicoline van Harskamp, who taught herself IPA and aspires to one day write it at verbatim speed like Henry Higgins, attended the course and conducted an experiment among her fellow students and her teachers. She played them an audio clip with her own voice and asked them to comment on her English or, in linguistic terms, her ‘production’. The various critiques are collaged into an audio track, and subtitled using the symbols of the IPA.
2014-2015
live translation events, installation, publication, theatre play (50 minutes) and single channel video (15 minutes)
A Romance in Five Acts and Twenty-one Englishes is based on Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion – A Romance in Five Acts. Twenty-one translations of the play were collected and re-translated into English in front of a live audience at Kunstraum, London, and later brought together as a book by Onomatopee, Eindhoven. A cast of native English speaking actors later staged the second act of the play in its non-native English adaptation in Amsterdam, Berlin and Eindhoven.
With Mark Bellamy as Henry Higgins, Claire King as Mrs Pearce, Mark Kingsford as Alfred Doolittle, Ralph de Rijke as Mr Pickering, and Cézanne Tegelberg as Liza Doolittle.
Kunstwerke, Berlin
Kunstraum, London
Onomatopee, Eindhoven
Ellen Gallery, Montreal
2015
single channel video (7 minutes and 44 seconds)
Wer Mae Haois the result of a series of workshops held at De Zonnebloemschool and Extra City, Antwerp, in which children with different language backgrounds explored the possibilities for an English of the future. In this video, shots of the group of children telling a story in an English constructed from their individual, self-made varieties, are juxtaposed with close-ups of their hands cutting up pages of English dictionaries, and constructing a celebratory puppet that they dance with in their gymnasium.
2016
single channel video (3 minutes and 30 seconds)
In Every Minute a Language Dies, animated drawings accompany recorded interviews with representatives of NGOs working on language preservation in Barcelona. The Spanish and Catalan nationals seem to disagree on issues of the lifespan of a language and its attachment to either meaning or place, and what happens when two different language groups come into contact. Their animated hand movements add a further layer of expression.
2014
single channel video (4 minutes and 32 seconds)
Four proficient yet not native speakers of English were invited to the remote Swedish island Gotland. The women from Korea, Cuba, Serbia and Iran, each with a specific interest in language, spent three days in an isolated house, a ‘place without language’. They tried to familiarize themselves with each other’s English, using existing linguistic experiments as a tool.
The video work is the result of an improvisation session, where the women speak out each other’s phrases in an unusual range of interpretations, not attempting to correct them into a more accurate English, but staying true to an original sentence.
She Put Me in Complexity of Words was filmed by a local crew on Hammar Beach, the exact location where in 1966 Ingmar Bergman recorded Persona, his portrait of two women who get entangled in each other’s identities. The video resonates Bergman’s film in the atmosphere of language and location, as well as in the title.
With Jinjoo Kim, Setareh Fatehi Irani, Katarina Popovic and Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo.
This work was produced in collaboration with the Baltic Art Centre in Visby, Sweden.
2016
single channel video (7 minutes and 32 seconds)
Apologies and Compliments stems from a session of the Discourse and Rhetoric Group, Loughborough University, UK, in which the academic members were played excerpts from other episodes of Englishes in which someone is complimented on, or apologizes for, their English. The academics can be heard to analyze these apologies and compliments. The visuals are taken from the scanned annotated documents used during the session.
2016
single channel video (15 minutes and 54 seconds)
Esplorobjektoj, meaning ‘case studies’ in Esperanto, is a video recording of a translation session with the artist and a number of students the Sandberg Institute and the Curatorial Programme at De Appel, Amsterdam. After studying the language for some weeks, they invited Esperanto instructor Leston Buell to work with them to translate the press release of the 2016 exhibition “You Must Make Your Death Public“ from English.
By proposing an alternative link language for the arts, this work highlights the widespread use of English langauge jargon in art writing.
View the exhibition text in Esperanto, Vi Devas Fari Vian Morton Publika, here.
2016
single channel video (16 minutes)
Darling Good night consists of an audio track superimposed onto a video of a still lake. The accompanying audio records the stories of a number of people who are waiting for their residence permits in an isolated part of Norway, retelling their linguistic journeys from Eritrea, Syria, Ethiopia, and Sudan to Europe. The lake and mountains in the video are their exact view while waiting at Jølster refugee center and learning a regional variety of Norwegian.
This work was co-produced by the Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum, Førde.
2014-2016
Englishes is the overall title of project about the modification of the English language by its non-native speakers.
The series currently consists of 9 individual works, each researched and produced in collaboration with an art institutions and/or university, and each broaching a particular area of linguistics such as phonology, pragmatics and translation.
Englishes aims to depict the development of the plurality of spoken English that displaces the perceived position of primacy occupied by dominant strains of the language. It proposes a dissolution of English into Englishes, co-opting it as a common and ever-growing linguistic resource.
The works have been presented individually or an connection with others in various presentations since 2014. A first overview of “Englishes” was presented in an exhibition with the same title at BAK, Utrecht in 2016 and at the C3A in Cordoba, Spain.
Basis Aktuele Kunst, Utrecht
Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía
