Departing from the artist's work series Tranny-Tease (2009-ongoing), the artwork examines alphabet politics and mistranslations by employing the 'wrong' or inappropriate script for a given text. The Arabic text in...
Departing from the artist's work series Tranny-Tease (2009-ongoing), the artwork examines alphabet politics and mistranslations by employing the 'wrong' or inappropriate script for a given text.
The Arabic text in the image reads "سیسه," which translates to "hookah" in English. This mirrors the French text "ceci n'est pas" ("this is not"), making the full phrase an allusion to René Magritte's famous painting The Treachery of Images, which features the phrase "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe"). Marcel Broodthaers himself translated Magritte's original painting in Model: The Pipe (Modèle: La Pipe), 1969, a work that Slavs and Tatars departed from. By doing so, Slavs and Tatars further create a layer of abstraction that invites the viewer to ponder the nature of objects and their interpretations through the lens of Magritte and Broodthaers, while re-contextualizing the Western art historical canon.
Departing from the artist's work series Tranny-Tease (2009-ongoing), the artwork examines alphabet politics and mistranslations by employing the 'wrong' or inappropriate script for a given text.
The Arabic text in the artitst new work reads "سیسه" which translates to "hookah" in English. This mirrors the French text "ceci n'est pas" ("this is not"), making the full phrase an allusion to René Magritte's famous painting "The Treachery of Images," which features the phrase "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe").
