BABEL

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Archival Inkjet Print, 2018

Babel deals with failures of text, language, and translation and how those are related to gender politics. The texts represented are drawn from literature specifically focused on female representation. Both texts and images are reproduced using the scanner as a camera. I treat these images as documents. Witnesses to an erosion.

This project is a research-practice investigating how the patriarchal system has shaped language as an oppressive force in the lives of women as in kept them largely invisible. The research material includes folklore, fairy tales, literature, and spoken language.

Growing up using one language and now speaking another drove me to look at language as a subject and material for artistic practice. I started to investigate visual representations of language attrition and how each language starts to fail itself and the other at a certain point. In choosing Farsi and English, I am using the languages I know to explore how visual and linguistic representation and translation can fail one another. These failures of language can have far-reaching consequences that include many of the outcomes of colonialism as well as the oppression of the disempowered.