Language, with all its complexities and various manifestations, is the research domain of the Serbian-born artist Katarina Zdjelar. The speaking of language and speaking in a language other than one’s mother tongue are recurring themes in her work. For example, in her pieces There Is No Is (2006) and The Perfect Sound (2008).
Zdjelar’s interest in what is now a commonly occurring situation, where people find themselves ‘between two languages’, is not so much focused on the potential loss of meaning in the translation process, but on the creative potential of this linguistic – and cultural. (…) In Zdjelar’s work, it becomes clear how our voices mark out our sovereign existence. The voice is the place where we ourselves – confronted with any system, such as language, ideology or religion – can determine how we want to relate to that system. Do we adopt a perfectly accent-free Queen’s English, so that we are no longer ‘different’, or do we keep our accents and create a unique variation in which we preserve our own identity?
Christel Vesters
Language, with all its complexities and various manifestations, is the research domain of the Serbian-born artist Katarina Zdjelar.