Metallic fingers flick through the pages of books, their mechanical bodies emitting a churning sound as the engines recoil and repeat the movement.
Indian artist Shailesh BR’s kinetic installation Page Turner (Ulta Pulta) presents rows of these books, housed in contraptions made by the artist to perform a single action. A contemplation on ritualistic methods in academic and religious contexts, the work is also a critique of rote learning and an “unthinking reliability on mainstream media”, as the artist describes it, that have come to dominate contemporary modes of thought.
How language and knowledge are wielded and weaponised is a crucial question within Page Turner (Ulta Pulta), which is part of the exhibition Language is Migrant at Warehouse421 in Abu Dhabi, which ends next month.
Presented in partnership with Colomboscope, a contemporary arts festival established in Sri Lanka in 2013, the show expands on the role of language within communities and societies. How does language travel and evolve? How does it shape us? How can it be used to control or liberate us? These are the questions it seeks to answer.
Language is Migrant takes its title from the 2016 poem-manifesto by Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuna, who lives in New York and Santiago. It's written in part to respond to rhetoric against migrants, continued global warfare and the ever-growing toxicity of fake news and divisive media.
curator
“Language is migrant. Words move from language to language, from culture to culture, from mouth to mouth. Our bodies are migrants, cells and bacteria are migrants too. Even galaxies migrate,” Vicuna writes in her opening lines.
“What is then this talk against migrants? It can only be talk against ourselves, against life itself.”
As much as language can be used to divide, it can also used to unite, as demonstrated in artist Lebanese-Dutch artist Mounira Al Solh’s In Blood In Love.
On view as part of the exhibition, the work comprises words scribbled in charcoal on the wall paired with a hanging textile piece. Embroidered words relate to love.
As part of this ongoing collaborative project, Al Solh first worked with groups of women in Sri Lanka, asking them to stitch words such as “affection”, “youthful passion”, “blood” and “fever” in English and Sinhala, compiled and translated from the 13th-century Islamic theologian Ibn Qayyim Al Jawziyya.
On the walls are columns of the words in English, French, Arabic, Tagalog, Sinhala and Tamil, proof of how concepts find homes in various mother tongues.
Anushka Rajendran, who curated the show with Colomboscope artistic director Natasha Ginwala, says the embroidery was completed during Covid-19 lockdowns. With limited access to stores for fabric, the women exchanged materials from home instead, adding a new dimension to the process of the work.
“It’s also about their own domestic confinement, and what that brings about. It’s meaningful to think about some of these words during this time and in this context, about what sustains them,” Rajendran explains.
Other artworks exemplify how the visual language of art can express lesser-known or suppressed knowledge and histories, particularly in relation to displacement and migration. Sri Lankan Vinoja Tharmalingam’s The Day, for example, traces the scarred landscape of her homeland, a result of the decades-long civil war. Stitching the paths of internal displacement and sites still populated by landmines, she creates a body of evidence that bears testimony to these memories.
Meanwhile, Vijitharan Maryathevathas’s illustrations offer a glimpse into the artist’s interior world, rooted in his experience of displacement after the Sri Lankan Army recaptured his home town of Killinochi from the Tamil Tigers in 2009.
poet and artist
Lavkant Chaudhary’s Maasinya Dastoor series includes scrolls that chronicle the history of the indigenous Tharu community in Nepal, to which he belongs — a group oppressed through bonded labour, caste systems and displacement. The body of work acts as a testament to a people whose experiences have been left out of official documents.
“These are very much South Asian narratives, but at the same time, we feel that these words do really kind of signify how global movement is and how movement is integral to everything. Circulation is primordial to any part of the world,” Rajendran says.
Movement is inherent to human existence, and ideas within the works in Language is Migrant can ripple across the Gulf, where migrants arrive in search of opportunity, forming and navigating multicultural and multilingual communities linked by labour and commerce.
In the UAE, for example, everyday language can reflect the various nationalities that live here. Interactions can include scatterings of Urdu, Hindi, Filipino and Farsi (and their prominence varies across different neighborhoods), among the more dominant languages of English and Arabic.
How histories echo across different societies is highlighted in Pangrok Sulap’s impressive large-scale woodcut print on fabric titled All Nations are Created Special.
Conceived following months of dialogue between Pangrok Sulap, a collective of artists and musicians from Malaysia, and Sri Lankan music group The Soul, the piece overlaps the movement of Malay populations to Sri Lanka around 200 BC and ethnic hierarchies present in both societies.
Such historical parallels can also be drawn in the Gulf, too, where migration has been requisite to its progress and groups from around the world are building shared histories that otherwise would not have existed without movement.
As the entanglement of languages can reflect on the potential for more harmonious communities, with the right words, can we speak our way to peace? Vicuna believes so. “Language is the translator,” she writes. “It could translate us to a place where we cease to tolerate injustice, abuse and the destruction of life. Life is language.”
Language is Migrant is on show at Warehouse421 in Abu Dhabi until May 8
