The colloquium takes its cue from Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s (1987) book title, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Anzaldúa, like many other writers and scholars, demonstrates that crossing borders may bring about an... [ view full abstract ]
The colloquium takes its cue from Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s (1987) book title, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Anzaldúa, like many other writers and scholars, demonstrates that crossing borders may bring about an acute sense of one’s difference and otherness, which can be a source of weakness or of power. Artists have been crossing geographical, linguistic and symbolic borders for centuries. In the process, they have been appropriating and mixing different language codes, inventing novel scripts, words and forms of display, combining language with other modalities, and so on. Many have used language to index new, physical or mythical places, as well as lost, found and imaginary identities. The aim of this panel is to examine how the spatial, disciplinary, methodological, aesthetic and political borderlands are explored by visual artists through displayed language of inscriptions, citations, conversations, autonomous ‘language objects’, and so on. The colloquium includes seven papers that focus on: (1) the Austrian art brut artist August Walla!’s ‘universal’ language that indexes his imaginary world as heterotopic (Busch); (2) the Hong Kong artist Wilson Shieh 石家豪 and his ‘documentary’ art compared and contrasted with a sociolinguistic dictionary project (Hutton); (3) semiotic trans/actions of the Chinese, New York-based artist Zhang Hongtu張宏圖 positioning his work across different symbolic, social and geographical spaces (Lee); (4) the British artist Jeremy Deller, who combines language, place and public space to re-imagine the present, past, familiar and remote social and political worlds (Monaghan); (5) a selection of contemporary Israeli artists, who use Hebrew to create a rich and heterogeneous visual language that cuts across cultural, political, religious and national faultlines at different scale levels (Tannenbaum); (6) contemporary Arabic calligraffiti artists, who dynamically reconfigure urban spaces and blur the boundary between art and activism (Panović ); (7) ‘spectacular’ text-based pieces operating in the gap between aesthetics and politics (Jaworski).
