The Spoken Worlds project follows the thread of using native language, interlanguage, and translation in curating and artistic practices in the UK and was co-curated by Moritz Cheung, Roxana Gibescu, Marta Marsicka, Basil Olton and June Yuen Ting – five curators identifying as immigrant and diasporic. The Spoken Worlds film is a collection of interviews and reflections on the multiple challenges of being an immigrant or a diaspora professional in the UK. The film takes a deep dive into their art practices and sheds light on their experiences of being bilingual and how this affects their creative practice. The starting point for these interviews was a set of questions we, as a curatorial group, came up with about the language(s) used in the diaspora.
We invited the following art practitioners from various diasporas in the UK: visual artist Małgorzata Dawidek, poet and curator Simona Nastac and research curator and artist Denise Kwan, to ponder on their practices. Małgorzata Dawidek is a visual artist, writer and art historian.
Małgorzata’s practice is focused on the conflict between the condition of the human body and discursive language. Creating a space for potentiality and positive categories in the field of boundary experiences, Małgorzata develops her own concepts of bodygraphy and affective art practice.
Basil Olton is an artist, curator and researcher with studies in ceramics, fine art practice and arts management and public policy. Basil’s practice is influenced by the relationship between materiality and the still image, experimenting between the differing modes of application and specificity to explore the effect of colonialism on institutional memory, commemoration and identity and the broader relationship with private and public space, power and display.
Simona Nastac is a curator, critic and poet living in London. She studied Art History and Theory in Bucharest and holds an MA in Creative Curating from Goldsmiths University, London. Committed to socio-critical art and context-responsive practices, Simona is forever looking for unexpected outcomes able to shake the world – in a gentle way. She is interested in everything at the intersection of art, poetry, ecology and social justice.
Denise Kwan is an artist working across social practice, visual ethnography and material culture, and migration studies. By working with ideas of embodiment and diaspora, her ideas manifest through sculpture, writing and participatory work. Her PhD research (University of Westminster) explored the use of socially engaged art and material culture with two generations of British Chinese women (2019). She collaborated with two generations and created a bi-lingual Cantonese and English art school at Haringey Chinese Community Centre, London.
Another part of the Spoken Worlds project is a manifesto which explores the idea that language matters are political and social matters. We, the five co-curators, have produced a written manifesto outlining our ambitions and goals towards the inclusion of immigrant artists and a useful dictionary detailing the meaning of immigration-related terms, such as micro-history, microaggression and xenoracism. The Spoken Worlds Diaspora Manifesto can be found here:
– Moritz Cheung, Roxana Gibescu, Marta Marsicka, Basil Olton and June Yuen Tin, 2023
