Critical works by international artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nadia Myre, Erdem Taşdelen and Eleanor King will be shown for the first time in Vancouver in It Is Almost That, opening May 6. Curated by Ines Min, the exhibition brings together artists from the east and west coasts of North America to investigate the political potential of translation.

The show will feature four bodies of work by the four artists. Cha’s Re Dis Appearing (1977) is a short video that juxtaposes poetic images of a bowl of tea, a beach and water with stream-of-consciousness translations of English and French phrases. King’s Wormholes (2016) are vibrant drawings created by tracing the outline of a CD repeatedly in a spectrum of coloured pencils. Myre’s Orison (2014) are a series of large-scale black-and-white digital prints that expose the reverse side of an older work titled Indian Act (2002). Taşdelen’s The Elements of Discontent (2015) are striking compositions of graphic images sourced from psychology textbooks.

Each artist demonstrates a subversive use of translation, incorporating an act of performance in the production of the work. The exhibition seeks to visualize these hidden processes, engaging in translation as a practice that shifts, destabilizes and negotiates agency. A moment of radical possibility is discovered in the works, which is re-deployed anew with every audience encounter.

The exhibition was organized with support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory in collaboration with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at The University of British Columbia.