Visual Representations of Multilingualism Exploring aesthetic approaches to communication in a fine art context
Jessica Bradley, University of Sheffield
jessica.bradley@sheffield.ac.uk; @JessMaryBradley
Introduction
Visual Representations of Multilingualism was a project through which we invited artists to submit images of artworks around the topic of multilingualism and living multilingually. It was initiated by the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), represented by a member of the Executive Committee, Zhu Hua, as part of a drive to represent multilingualism within the organisation. Zhu Hua approached Jessica Bradley (co-convenor of the AILA Network for Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics) to collaborate with her, having both worked on a series of arts based projects through the AHRC-funded Translation and Translanguaging (TLANG) project. The TLANG project had been the catalyst for a number of artistic projects, including a series of Creative Arts Labs held in 2017 and 2018, follow-on projects 'LangScape Curators', 'Migration and Home: Welcome in Utopia' (AHRC Connected Communities Festival 2016) and 'Migration and Settlement: Extending the Welcome' (ESRC IAA) at Leeds (Jessica) and a Leverhulme Artist in Residence grant at Birkbeck (Zhu Hua). Jessica invited Louise Atkinson, director of CuratorSpace, to be involved and CuratorSpace agreed to host the project and manage the submission process. Jessica then invited Abigail Harrison Moore, Professor of Art History at the University of Leeds and expert in external engagement to be on the judging panel. The project was originally framed as a competition, and received support from the publisher Multilingual Matters. One of the project's objectives was to bring together a series of images of artworks engaging with multilingualism for an exhibition (held at the annual meeting of BAAL in 2019 at Manchester Met University) to elicit debate and to showcase across different spaces, including on BAAL’s website.
Timeline
The opportunity was advertised on CuratorSpace on 11 October 2018 (see link to original call here). On 21 January 2019 Jessica and Louise published a follow up blog post on CuratorSpace with more information about the call, to encourage artists to consider the opportunity. We used Penelope Gardner Chloros' ideas for why artists work multilingually as a way to show how artists might engage with multilingualism in different and overlapping ways:
The deadline was 29 March 2019. By this date we received over 90 entries, some with multiple images. We developed scoring criteria and each judge assessed every entry, using this criteria.
Scoring Criteria
1. Close engagement with the theme, i.e. creative ways of representing multilingualism; 2. Effective communication: clear and compelling in communicating dynamic multilingualism to the public; 3. High-quality digital image (300 dpi); 4. Relationship between medium and content: providing clear reasons for using a particular medium in the production of the work
The panel then met to agree a longlist and the final shortlist of three winning entries which would be recommended for the three prizes offered by BAAL. Details of these were sent to the BAAL executive committee for confirmation and approval. BAAL published a blog post with the details of the winning entries on 28 June 2019. A blog post was published on the University of Sheffield School of Education's Research blog summarising the project on 18 April 2019, followed by an announcement of the winning entries on 2 July 2019. The exhibition, artist talk and presentation at BAAL 2019 are summarised in a blog post published on 5 September 2019.
The selected artworks and exhibition
The exhibition was programmed by Jessica and Louise as a digital installation, featuring a selection of the submitted works, as chosen for the longlist by the judging panel. The catalogue is available in full here. Three artworks were selected as the prize winners as follows:
Linda Persson, Wongatha women, Geraldine and Luxie Hogarth, with parts of the community of Leonora, Desert of Eastern Goldfields, Australia (1st prize)
Linda Persson’s practice is research based and she often works collaboratively with a range of disciplines to expand methodologies. The Light and Language project took place in a remote community in the Western Australia Goldfields desert area. She worked with the local community over two years to try and lift the cultural heritage and mother tongue languages through the layers of historical events. This included work with the traditional owners of the land (Tjupan, Ngalia, Wongatha people) as well as the first and second wave immigration (Greek, Italian, Scandinavian, Slavic, Baltic) to Australia throughout colonialism, the gold rush and more recent times. The works were made using bendable LED lights shaped into conglomerate, traditional and meaningful words chosen and spelt by the mixed community. This was displayed for one night only across three roads linking the ancient site of the Dingo Dreaming, the old gold mine village and the new small town of Leonora.
Gail Prasad (2nd prize)
Gail Prasad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research investigates linguistic diversity in schools and expansive multilingual pedagogies in mainstream school settings. She draws on arts-based methodologies including drawing, painting, self-portraiture, photography, and collage to engage children and youth as co-researchers in exploring and representing their linguistic diversity.
Elina Karadzhova (3rd prize)
Elina Karadzhova is an Edinburgh-based, Bulgarian-born, visual artist and a researcher. Her long-term project explores the experience of living in-between languages through visual arts. Elina is interested in the bi/multilingual personality as a collage of languages and she explores this phenomenon through art-based participatory research. She often uses the medium of film and moving images installations as mediators and facilitators between research and lived experiences. Her art practice as a researcher and an artist is focused on languages and their impact on our sense of belonging, memory and identity. The medium of moving images fascinates her not only as an artistic outcome, but also as a process, as a collaborative practice.
Conceptual underpinnings
Creative Inquiry in Applied Linguistics
The project responds to and builds on what might be considered a 'turn' in applied linguistics towards the artistic, considered initially by Jessica, writing with co-author Lou Harvey as 'Creative Inquiry' (2019). Institutional pushes towards public 'engagement' often involve researchers working with creative partners, as demonstrated in the TLANG Creative Arts Labs, and while this way of working has the potential to lead to exciting and productive relationships, it also risks operationalising collaborations towards 'research communication' or dissemination, with the artist positioned as a communicative tool or vessel. Much research challenges this linear model, and significant work is being done to embed artists within research projects and develop lines of inquiry which are truly transdisciplinary and empowering for all involved. Nevertheless, this project offers a space to consider the challenges present when engaging in interdisciplinary exploration and when inviting others into our [disciplinary] spaces. What will we give up? What are we prepared to let go of? As Ofelia García states, any kind of creativity must be combined with criticality (2020).
Translanguaging
In recent years, research has opened up to consider multilingualism as dynamic (Li, 2018), with translanguaging becoming a popular term for conceptualising such dynamism (see García & Li, 2014; Moore et al., 2020). Our research as part of the TLANG project demonstrated the creativity and criticality deployed by people when communicating in everyday spaces: in libraries, gyms, basketball courts and advice centres. We use whatever resources we have to hand to make ourselves understand and to understand others. Translanguaging takes the individual and the individual's communicative repertoire as the starting point, and considers each individual's communicative repertoire to be made up of multiple communicative resources. These resources include but are not limited to named languages. Jessica's research with street artists demonstrated the multimodal affordances of translanguaging, in capturing the dynamic communicative practices involved in creative artworks. It also brought translanguaging into contact with theories of intra-action from a new materialist perspective (Barad, 2007). Here, it is used as an underpinning theory for the artworks, how multilingualism is conceptualised, and the processes embedded within the artworks.
Talks and presentations
Jessica and Zhu Hua presented the project as part of the invited colloquium at BAAL2019 at Manchester Met University, where the exhibition launched. The School of Education at the University of Sheffield were able to fund three artists to attend the conference and we organised an artist question and answer session after the colloquium within the exhibition space. Three artists participated in this: Linda Persson, Elina Karadzhova and Yasmin Nicholas, all whose work was featured in the exhibition. They talked about their creative processes and why and how they engaged with the concept of multilingualism through their work.
The exhibition continued to travel. It was presented at the 'TLANG2 Languaging in Times of Change' conference at the University of Stirling in September 2019, then at Jyvaskyla University, Finland, in November 2019 as part of an invited talk led by Jessica and creative zine workshop led by Louise for a workshop organised by Sari Poyhonen on art and applied linguistics. The artworks were exhibited as part of a series of seminars and talks on multilingualism at the University of Sheffield in December 2019. In February 2020, Jessica and Louise were invited to speak at Leeds Art Library for the first event for the AHRC-funded LILA network, at which they also showcased the artworks.
Public Engagement
In 2019, Jessica was awarded funding for the ESRC Festival of Social Sciences to hold an event, 'Multilingualism in the City', which she organised in collaboration with the MakerFutures Project in Burngreave, a suburb of Sheffield. The artworks were exhibited to the public and Louise led a zine making workshop around the languages and linguistic landscapes of Sheffield. The Art Doctors were on hand to prescribe the art to those taking part and explore the intersections of creativity and languages.
Selected works
Further reflections
Louise Atkinson shared her reflections on the project (November 2020): 'For me, it's about getting artists to think about their work in terms of how it fits into research agendas, as a way of highlighting their practice but also developing more potential income streams...or even just understanding how artists might work with researchers, and vice versa. For researchers, it's about how they might think beyond 'art as dissemination'. The multimodal approach, demonstrated by the artworks and through the artists' processes lends itself to exploring multilingualism in ways beyond spoken and written 'language'. The use of a particular medium adds to the meaning of the work in relation to multilingualism, but also brings with it the history of that medium and the ways that it has been used to communicate ideas previously. It highlights affective approaches to research into multilingualism and communication in general.'
Publications
The following publications have arisen from the project so far:
Bradley, J., Zhu Hua & Atkinson, L. (2022) Visual Representations of Multilingualism: Exploring aesthetic approaches to communication in a Fine Art context. In Anderson, J., Lytra, V., Macleroy, V. & Ros e Sole, C. (Eds) Liberating Language Education. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Bradley, J. & Atkinson, L. (2022, forthcoming) Conversation Through Art. In Griffiths, D., Macrory, G., Ainsworth, S. & Pahl, K. (Eds) Multilingualism and Multimodality: Working at the Intersections. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.