17 October 2020
Book launch: My Name Is Language
By Nicoline van Harskamp
On Saturday 17 October 2020, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht hosts a program surrounding the new book of artist Nicoline van Harskamp, My Name Is Language (2020), published by Scriptings and Archive Books. The program takes place as part of the reopening of at BAK, on 16 & 17 October 2020.
The publication My Name Is Language (2020) explores the key tenets of artist Nicoline van Harskamp’s research and practice, such as the contemporary use and modification of languages, a treatment of names as spoken language rather than spelled identity markers, and the practice of self-naming.
In this event launching the publication in the Netherlands, literary scholar Avishek Ganguly and art curator Antonia Alampi speak about translation and untranslatability and the potential of re-naming and self-naming through their own, and van Harskamp’s practice. Also on this occasion, BAK’s Artistic and General Director Maria Hlavajova, writer and literary translator Canan Marasligil, BAK’s Curator of Public Practice Rachael Rakes, and art historian Ilse van Rijn engage with excerpts from scripts of the eponymous performance series My Name Is Language (2018-ongoing). The performance series emerged from van Harskamp’s work PDGN (2016), developed in the framework of the artist’s exhibition Englishes at BAK in 2016, which inquired into the ways the use of language is entrenched in structures of class and power and which put forward a proposition of an unlikely but desirable world link language.
In this event launching the publication in the Netherlands, literary scholar Avishek Ganguly and art curator Antonia Alampi speak about translation and untranslatability and the potential of re-naming and self-naming through their own, and van Harskamp’s practice. Also on this occasion, BAK’s Artistic and General Director Maria Hlavajova, writer and literary translator Canan Marasligil, BAK’s Curator of Public Practice Rachael Rakes, and art historian Ilse van Rijn engage with excerpts from scripts of the eponymous performance series My Name Is Language (2018-ongoing). The performance series emerged from van Harskamp’s work PDGN (2016), developed in the framework of the artist’s exhibition Englishes at BAK in 2016, which inquired into the ways the use of language is entrenched in structures of class and power and which put forward a proposition of an unlikely but desirable world link language.
