WORD/IMAGE/ACTION Part 2

About

Join us for a discussion with artists and writers whose work aims to subvert political control, and whose creativity connects audiences with their language cultures. 

Joining the discussion will be: poet and writer Chris McCabe; linguist, author and educator Mandana Seyfeddinipur; artist and Welsh language activist Ivor Davies and artist Jez Dolan who was instrumental in the Polari translation of the King James Bible, which features in the Swirl of Words / Swirl of Worlds exhibition. 

This event is part of Swirl of Words / Swirl of Worlds , a multi-platform and multi-media arts programme celebrating Hackney’s ethnic diversity and exploring how language shapes and informs cultural and individual identities. Over the summer, Hoxton Street neighbours PEER and Shoreditch Library will be the two main venues for a project that intersects visual arts with the written, spoken and printed word. The project has three main project strands:

• A poetry publication consisting of over 100 poems, one to represent each language spoken in Hackney. The poems appear in their original language and their English translation. 3,000 copies of this book are now available for free to Hackney Library Members.

• A multi-media group exhibition at both PEER and Shoreditch Library exploring themes of cultural identity, endangered and lost languages, modern communication, literary history and poetry.

• A 10-week public programme of live and virtual events and workshops.

Dr Mandana Seyfeddinipur is a linguist who studied at Free University of Berlin, then did her PhD in Psycholinguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and her Marie Curie postdoctoral work at Stanford University in the US. Since she directs the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme funded by Arcadia, which supports the documentation of endangered languages across the globe through funding, training and advocacy. Since 2014, she also directs the Endangered Languages Archive where now over 500 multimedia collections of endangered languages are preserved and made accessible free of charge globally. The two programmes moved in June 2021 from SOAS University of London to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Berlin, Germany.

Chris McCabe’s work crosses artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. His work has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. His most recent collection is The Triumph of Cancer (2018), which is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and his most recent novel is Mud (2019), a version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set beneath Hampstead Heath. He is writing a series of pyschogeographical books about the lost poets buried in London's cemeteries. He is the co-editor of The New Concrete: Visual Poetry for the 21st Century (2015) and editor of Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages (2019). He works at the National Poetry Library as the National Poetry Librarian.

Jez Dolan is a visual artist and theatre-maker based in Manchester. For the past decade Jez’s practice has underlined the intersections between queerness, sexuality, identity and memory. These interests are expressed in a range of mediums including, drawing, installation, printmaking and performance, utilising the medium which best expresses the message for each individual work.

He has shown work at; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, HOME Manchester, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, NYC, The National Gallery of Iceland, The People’s History Museum, The Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He has work in public and private collections internationally including The British Museum, The (UK) Government Art Collection and The Schwules* Museum Berlin.