The contemporary art exhibition  “Translating Worlds,” focusing on issues of translation and travelling stories, was curated by Milan Vukašinović and Nilüfer Şaşmazer, as a part of the Retracing Connections programme. The exhibition took place at Depo, Istanbul between November 2023 and January 2024. It featured existing and new works from fifteen international artists, including paintings, drawings, embroideries, sculptures, video and audio installations, and a lecture performance. The exhibition was conceived not only as communication outlet for the programme’s research results, but as an additional research activity that aimed to amend the inability of contemporary Translation Studies to account for all the meanings and practices of translation in the Middle Ages.

This webinar presents the academic and creative process behind this exhibition, the final artistic products, as well as the intellectual contributions it provided to the overall research project. It asks the questions of compatibility between translation studies, Byzantine and peri-Byzantine texts, historical processes, tavelling stories, trans-linguistic storyworlds and the medium of contemporary art. In this multifaceted intersection, contemporary art became the venue for untranslatability, negotiating between the personal, the poetic and the political. As it encountered the composite Byzantine worlds, it elucidated transhistorical instances of co-creation and communal existence. At the same time, by reintroducing medieval texts into the physical space, the artists gave them new material, visual and auditive forms. Thus, this collaboration probed the possibility of new secular rituals for the premodern artistic production, previously severed from its original ritual contexts through the intellectual practices of postmedieval, Western academia.     

The webinar by Milan Vukašinović (Uppsala University)
is organized by the Center for Medieval Arts & Rituals (University of Cyprus)
on April 4, 2024, at 16.30 (EET).
For more information and registration contact Andria Andreou.