Preface Since the Queens Museum was founded in 1972, it has become the main cultural center in a site where culture is constantly in flux. According to the 2000 census, Queens County is the most ethnically diverse in the United States, and in more ways than one: More than half the households in the borough are led by people born outside the United States, and 160 languages are spoken here. Due to Queens’ status as a way station where different cultures meet, the Museum sees itself as both a local and international cultural center. Our lives here in Queens are a collage of world cultures, and a model for the future of international cities. While the Museum does not hesitate to present community-based arts, it also mounts largescale exhibitions, such as Out of India, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, and ABCDF: Portraits of Mexico City, that attract regional and international attention, often relating to one of the constituencies of this hyper-diverse environment. In keeping with this tradition, we are proud to present Tarjama/Translation, an unprecedented exhibition that reshuffles social and geographical boundaries through the multivalent practices of translation. Alongside artists from Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Turkey and Morocco, the exhibition also includes artists from Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, thereby unsettling the very notion of the “Middle East” or “Arab world.” Approximately half of these artists work or practice in the United States or Western Europe, but the vast majority of their work has rarely, if ever, been seen by New York audiences. Rather than geographical areas with unchanging ethnic and cultural characteristics, “Middle East” and “Central Asia” are here understood as
complex points of exchange in time and space. Transnationality and exchange are historically associated with these regions, and many works in the exhibition suggest an updated understanding of these ideas as both local and global. The impossibility of translation; language and its role in the production of meaning; lost and fictional histories; monuments and collective memory; ambivalence and emblems of national pride; decadence and the information society: In their own way, these themes touch us all, and are especially relevant here in Queens. Yet, even as the artists of Tarjama/ Translation introduce us to underrecognized geographical and cultural complexities, they delve into their own vivid experience, specific to their place and time, and relevant to global human concerns. In the past five years, some of the most rewarding and successful exhibitions at the Museum have been collaborations. These have included a three-venue exhibition on the legacy of Robert Moses (along with the Museum of the City of New York and Columbia University) and a show on Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates project (with Cabinet magazine and White Columns). We are happy to be collaborating again. It has been a pleasure to work with the talented curatorial team assembled by ArteEast: Curators Leeza Ahmady and Iftikhar Dadi, Assistant Curator Reem Fadda, and Curatorial Assistant Sarah Malaika. The Tarjama/Translation team has a broad and deep vision that we have found consistently impressive. It has also been a pleasure to work with Livia Alexander, whose active understanding of the complexities of the subject matter of the show in particular and of exhibition production in general has been a great contribution.
At some level, translation is the basic question of our globalized world. We are excited to see how the translations proposed or resisted by the artists in this show are read by our audiences.
Tom Finkelpearl Executive Director Queens Museum of Art
Hitomi Iwasaki Director of Exhibitions Queens Museum of Art
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