METAMORPHOSIS AND FLUX

Curated by the Bangkok-based British artist Ralph Kiggell in collaboration with Brian Curtin Metamorphosis and Flux: An International Exhibition on Translation includes artists’ books, film and works on paper. The exhibition explores ideas of interpretation during the year that Bangkok has been designated a UNESCO World Book Capital.

Art is premised on translation and communication: from sense to concept and from thought to action and expression. Metamorphosis and Flux brings together an international selection of artists whose works grapple with the very idea of translation: how language, meanings and beliefs mutate as they move from one form to another. In a globalizing world, we are more aware than ever of the pressing but often fraught terms of exchange between different linguistic histories and contexts.

The artists in Metamorphosis and Flux are bilingual, multilingual, or students of foreign languages. Some are émigrés or have been influenced by cultures much different from their own. Through text and image this exhibition explores and celebrates the slippages, distortions, misunderstandings and humorous oddness that can emerge from the process of translation. Within the metamorphosis and flux that occurs we will inevitably find new ways of thinking about language and the world. Works are rendered with English, Greenlandic, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Thai, Spanish, Burmese and asemic texts and voices.