A Kitchen Reading

Synopsis

The artist reads aloud a piece of text written in English and the artist's friend Sofya Melnichuck orally translates the reading into Russian on the spot. The reading was filmed at the communal kitchen of Artkommunalka*. The kitchen was the place where families in the communal apartment exchanged their ideas, arts, and samizdats during the Soviet era. Unlike other works by the artist, this video was made with an awareness that the work would go through a translation in the future (in this case, into Korean). There are multiple translations in the work: from written text to spoken words, from spoken to spoken words, from English to Russian, and finally from spoken words (English) to written text (Korean subtitles). The text that is read and translated in the video keeps referring back to itself by discussing these various translations and the corresponding processes.