Translator
'Chaos' narrates the story of three women in three different cities. They have given up on life. One lives in Damascus. She has stopped speaking to others entirely, isolating herself in her flat. The other has left Damascus as a result of the war and went to Sweden, where she imprisons herself in her paintings, hoping through them to rid herself of the torments of the past. The third ended up in Vienna and faces an unknown future, like the ghost of a woman who fled Austria after the Second World War. It is a discussion between a woman stuck in Damascus, a second stuck in exile, and a third who has recently left. It is a conversation between the interior and exterior – an impossible conversation.
Writer
This installation is based on two texts that discuss the act of translating war and resilience, the intricacies of the wars in Syria and Iraq, mediated through testimony. The video merely shows a color: purple, projected on a mirrored screen that allows the viewer to see their own reflection, to see themselves within the subtitled text. Lina Mounzer’s essay ‘War in Translation: Giving Voice to the Women of Syria’ weaves the testimonies she is translating with her own personal experience of living through the civil war in Lebanon. Stefan Tarnowski’s essay ‘Subtitling a Film’ describes the intricacies of translating subtitles for the anonymous film collective Abounaddara and the special collaborative process of working for someone he has never met. Tarnowski uses this experience to reflect on the role of the subtitle, the details lost in translation, and what additional elements and contradictions are created by the differences between subtitles and image.
