After Babel
AFTER BABEL – an artistic intervention on the power of language by Babak Saed
Language is a very special material for the concept artist Babak Saed: it is both a medium and an artistic theme, for his works always deal with aspects of communication.
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| Babak Saed: "After Babel" - Installation in the Academy of Arts, Pariser Platz, Berlin |
His installations and works in public spaces, his prints, graphics and video and audio works demand special attention for the written word, as the Iranian-born artist uses only capital letters without punctuation and spaces in his works. He regards this WORD-TO-WORD language as a hybrid language, making detached reading more difficult. It requires both concentration from the viewer and critical consideration of what he sees. The language initially appears incomprehensible, and may turn out to be decodable or may remain a puzzle.
ICHDEUTSCHSPRECHENPERFEKT
For the concluding festival of “The power of language” project in June 2007, Babak Saed designed an artistic intervention which devoted itself to the Babylonian diversity of languages as an identity-forming medium. The theme of the “AFTER BABEL” installation is the extent to which language can serve as a means of excluding outsiders or of bringing them closer to the local inhabitants. What happens when the outsider begins to speak and reveals himself as such? Encounters between people of different linguistic origins are a particular characteristic of our age. If one assumes that language – including the native language – is subject to an ongoing dynamic process and is thus never finished, one can conclude that the ideal of full mastery even of a single language has to remain an illusion.
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| Babak Saed: "After Babel" - Installation in the Academy of Arts, Pariser Platz, Berlin |
In “AFTER BABEL”, Babak Saed used the languages of the countries which play host to branches of the Goethe-Institut. The concept consisted of a single sentence, slightly varied in each of the languages used. The content of the sentence says that the speaker masters the respective language perfectly. However, the sentences contain grammatical errors, so that a contradiction is immediately apparent. This contradiction symbolises the situation of the outsider: on the one hand, he aims at a certain feeling of being at home in the new culture. On the other, he would prefer not to entirely give up his own cultural background.
Only native speakers were asked to form the sentences. In doing so, they were to embed the type of errors in the sentences which they regard as typical mistakes made by non-native speakers. Babak Saed placed his installation on the external façade and inside on the glass segments of the sculpture garden. Whilst on the front side the sentence seems to be in a dialogue with the words “Akademie der Künste” (Academy of Arts), the arrangement inside recalls a map of the world – a map of the world made of languages.
Babak Saed’s work sometimes takes the viewer by surprise. This opens the way to encounters with unfamiliar things, because the experience of amazement, according to the American literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt in his book “Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World” (Chicago, 1991), reminds us that we only have an incomplete understanding of the world. One of the most tangible signs of this incompleteness is the inability to understand or to make oneself understood. There is something surprising about language differences in themselves.
The installation in the Academy of Arts was opened by Dr. Noémi Smolik.
Further information on Babak Saed
