Tongues
Tongues, 2018
Curated by Isabel Rouch
Eugene Choi, Kai Wasikowski and Yeliz Yorulmaz
"Tongues is the first offering in an ongoing curatorial project, exploring the varied effects language can have on us as individuals.
Whether or not we consciously consider it, we all have an ancient relationship with language, being one of the main traits thought to set us aside as human beings.
The complexities of human language stretch far beyond simple forms of communication. Our languages carry a lot within their signs, alphabets and phonetics, and inevitably lead directly to the extensive fields of culture and place. Our dialects, sociolects, and idiolects position us in society, simultaneously uniting and dividing us. In our current globalised context, the multitude of diverse tongues often get overlooked, left behind, misplaced and misinterpreted. There is a fragility to language, wherein even those passed down for thousands and thousands of years, can be broken or damaged from one generational gap in teaching and learning.
More commonly than not, people experience life through the lens of several different languages, yet many living in English dominated countries such as Australia, Don't learn a second, even with such a unique plethora at our fingertips.
What effect does experiencing the world and expressing ourselves in one language or another have on us?
What can be lost or gained through translation?
Tongues starts to scratch at the surface of these questions bringing together three unique perspectives from multidisciplinary, Sydney based artists, Yeliz Yorulmaz, Kai Wasikowski and Eugene Choi. Each artist has the shared experience of being multilingual or growing up in a multilingual contexts.
All three respond to the theme of identity through language, reflecting particularly on how their exposure to linguistic diversity has influenced them, and in addition, how their art practice fits into this layered understanding and correspondence.
While it is evident that language plays a major role in identifying us to others, in this reflection, the focus is turned back to the self.
As a visual contemplation, the exhibition frames artistic expression as a global language; with its own power to communicate, its own limitations, and possibilities of misinterpretation.
The three artistic narratives cross, contradict, and complement one another, and while the exhibition title is presented in three alternate tongues, the works sit together untranslated, allowing an ambiguous and self-contemplative setting for the viewer."
From the exhibition catalogue, written by the curator, Isabel Rouch.