Curated by Murtaza Vali
January 21 – March 6, 2010
Opening Reception: January 20, 7-9 pm
Kamrooz Aram
Brendan Fernandes
Miguel Luciano
Yamini Nayar
Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere
With people, culture and information circulating globally at accelerating rates, it might be said, that our day-to-day interactions are increasingly accented. The accent is the surplus of such cross-cultural interactions. It lies beyond translation, which strives to find equivalences for a particular expression in the syntax of another linguistic or cultural system. It is what exceeds language, resists assimilation. It is how newness enters a language or culture. It is additive, a pronouncement that focuses attention and a flourish that distracts. As the aural component of language, it embellishes its script sonically. Yet it can also be visual. Accent marks, in particular, indicate how text is to be enunciated. An accent is also understood as a feature that contrasts with or complements a decorative style, the key element that makes an interior come to life or a fashion outfit come together. Inspired by the attention to issues of language and translation precipitated by postcolonial theory, this exhibition brings together recent work in video, painting and photography that examine the different ways in which accents might operate in our contemporary moment.
Murtaza Vali is the winter 2010 recipient of the Lori Ledis Emerging Curatorial Fellowship, a program to foster curatorial talent in contemporary art.
Public Program
Wednesday, February 17, 7 pm
A Moving | Wall Pictures film and video program
John and Jane, 2005. Film still.
Murtaza Vali curates a screening of JOHN & JANE (dir. Ashim Ahluwalia), an experimental documentary portrait of call center workers in Mumbai, India who remotely provide round the clock service to customers across the United States. This outsourced labor forces these ambitious young Indians to enact virtual migrations, experiencing the processes of alienation, assimilation and enculturation that all immigrants endure without ever really leaving home. Classes in accent modification and the strange minutiae of American life and culture, paired with long night shifts, take a psychological toll, leaving them out of sync, temporally and culturally, with their immediate surroundings. Dislocated, a growing schizophrenia takes over, as dreams of the better life at the end of the phone line trumps their daily realities. Tweaking the realist conventions of documentary film making through moody cinematography and a glitchy techno soundtrack reminiscent of noir science fiction, JOHN & JANE evokes the uncanny mental spaces the call center workers eventually come to inhabit.
After the screening, Vali will discuss the film with Sukhdev Sandhu, chief film critic for the London Daily Telegraph, professor of literature at New York University and author of Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night.