Still from video trailer for Jennifer Hayashida’s book A Machine Wrote This Song
Still from video trailer for Jennifer Hayashida’s book A Machine Wrote This Song. Image credit: Jennifer Hayashida and Benj Gerdes.

Accelerator has a collaboration with the International Master’s Programme in Curating Art at Stockholm University. The students create events in connection to themes that Accelerator wishes to highlight in the exhibition programme. Curator for this event is Yuying Hu. In connection with Accelerator’s current exhibition, she will present a talk that centers around multilingualism, the interrelationship between language and society, and linguistic practices that initiate diverse societal changes.

This conversation is an online only event that will be broadcasted live on Accelerator’s Facebook page. The event lasts approximately 60 mins, it is recorded and will be available in Accelerator’s podcast and YouTube channel.

Johanna Gustafsson Fürst has in her exhibition Graft the Words, Whip My Tongue been concerned with themes such as monolingualism and its normative oppression, as well as multilingualism and its enriching potentiality. Borders between different languages embody a complex of power relations that are entangled with social, political, economic, and cultural realities in contemporary societal settings. The following questions will be discussed during the talk: How could we approach such existing power relations? What does it entail to be a bilingual/multilingual subject when navigating across these borders, for example, in the process of translation? In relation to that, translator Jennifer Hayashida and Associate Professor in Spanish Johan Järlehed will discuss how language in a broad sense interacts with social change processes, and how translation practice can be interpreted as an intervention towards the current monolingual reality.

Credits:

Yuying Hu, curator
Jennifer Hayashida, poet, translator and visual artist
Johan Järlehed, Associate Professor in Spanish