Acts of Translation

Acts of Translation, an exhibition by artist Mohammad Namazi, explores the process of immersion in a collection and how historic objects resonate with lived experience.

Thus begins How to see the Unheard, a thoughtful and challenging hand-bound book of possibilities and reflections by Mohammad Namazi, an Iranian artist, maker and educator living in London. Mohammad received his doctorate from Chelsea College of Arts in 2019 and was subsequently awarded a year-long research residency at UAL as part of the Decolonising the Archives programme. The residency, supported by the Decolonising Arts Institute and UAL Library, Archives and Special Collections, encouraged researchers to explore institutional histories and what it means to decolonise the University from within.

Mohammad began his residency with an intensive immersion in the University’s special collections. He spent deep time in the Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection, the UAL Art Collection and the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection. He blew dust from boxes, analysed lists of data, rummaged, ruminated, watched, listened…  He searched for traces of cultural encounters, challenges to Eurocentrism and evidence of what it means to be an artist and maker cast adrift in an unfamiliar place. This search proved at times unsatisfactory, but finally, Mohammad found somewhere to settle.

In the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection he found inspiration in the work of film makers including the Black Audio Film Collective, whose 1986 film essay Handsworth Songs challenged colonial legacies and Thatcherite notions of what British Culture should be. Likewise the Scratch Video artist collective Gorilla Tapes, whose 1984 Death Valley Days satirised the policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Drawing parallels between the moment in time highlighted by these films and current global events, Mohammad went on to have conversations with the film curator June Givanni, the artist and fellow Iranian Mitra Tabrizian and curator and Senior Research Fellow at UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute Hammad Nasar. They talked about curatorial practice as a decolonial strategy, cultural production, migration, race and identity and cultural constructions.

Mohammad’s artist’s book How to see the Unheard documents these discussions and is the subject of Acts of Translation, an exhibition in the Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection Window Gallery. The exhibition runs from early November to 28 January 2022.