Photo: Đỗ Văn Hoàng
On April 13-14, 2024, at the 1st Conference on Curating in Vietnam, co-organized by Á Space and School of Interdisciplinary Sciences and Arts – Vietnam National University, Hanoi with the support from Dogma Collection, Nguyen Art Foundation, and The Outpost Art Organisation, I delivered a talk titled ‘Translation as a meaning-making method in curatorial text’ as part of Symposium 4: Writing as a curatorial strategy. Below is the abstract for the essay that I presented:
“In the contemporary context of Vietnam, as artistic concepts and approaches to immanent aesthetics are increasingly intermingling and interacting with diverse frameworks of knowledge and interdisciplinary ideologies, the task of meaning-making thus belongs to not only artists but also curators and other individuals involved in operational work within the art community. Curatorial practice has now become complex, requiring depth of understanding and flexibility – qualities also evident in translational practice. In this paper, positioned as someone who has traversed all three realms of writing, translating, and curating, the author aims to provide a preliminary comparison of the similarities between the work of translators and curators. Subsequently, based on practical experiences, the author will propose three suggestions for the production of meanings through translation when writing curatorial texts, including annotative translation, performative translation, and collective translation. Each suggestion will offer a way to approach, interact, or apply artistic concepts and theoretical framework, in order to arrive at a boundary-opening and complementary way of writing. In so doing, we can perceive curatorial texts as an invitation for contribution, whose target audience is not limited to artists and curators, but other multidisciplinary agents in the field, as well as the general public.“
Photo taken by Cá Con and Đỗ Văn Hoàng.
A PDF copy of the essay (in English or Vietnamese) can be requested via email.