Matters of Translation attempts to examine art's relationship with translation as both a medium with the ability to translate, and as a medium that transcends the need for translation.
Translation is typically thought of and understood as the transmission of information across distinct tongues, cultures, histories and spaces. However, if we were to take Gilles Deleuze's assertion that art carries not one bit of information, and that it actively resists communication and by contrast creates vacuoles of non-communication, then we would have to re-address art's relation to the conventionalities of translation. This is the predominant interest and conceptual basis for the curators of Matters of Translation.
The six artists that make up this group exhibition: Samual Buckley, Alex Culshaw, Kirsty Macdonald, Theresa Moerman, Lotte Scott and Sean Steadman, have all graduated in the summer of 2012 from various institutions across the country and each make work that addresses the paradoxes and difficulties of translation. Each artist is concerned with their own distinct understanding of translation, and each artist's work manifests itself in a highly individual way with scarcely visible threads connecting them to the next artist.
An exhibition is not understanding. An exhibition about translation and about the impossibilities of translation. An exhibition about connection. Matters of Translation sits as a question and resists a determinate understanding; it is the offering of the curators for further thought on this infinitely instructive subject.
