Translating from the Edges
Organized by Maria Markham
Ely Center of Contemporary Art
New Haven
Through Nov. 2
Sonja Langford’s art book Please Describe Your Pain reads like a series of dispatches from secret interviews, in danger of being lost. That starts with the medium itself: the book is printed on a flimsy type of paper that would tear easily, burn in a second. One statement appears per page, often tilted, as if printed in haste, before some authority found out about it. The statements are anonymous, isolated. Their presentation suggests that the speakers are telling things to the interviewer that their doctors might not know. “My hips feel like they’re being squeezed in a vice grip,” reads one page. “Sex is painful. Walking is painful. It’s painful to just exist,” reads another. “Feels like electric shocks zapping through my lower back and down my legs.” The book prompts questions about the quality of the medical care the speakers are getting, and what failures, in interpersonal communication, in the system, might be preventing it from getting better.
Langford’s book, as she writes, “interrogates how knowledge about the body is recorded, distributed, and controlled. I work with ephemeral and fragile materials, often repurposing medical forms, exam table paper, and found documents to challenge the authority of the printed record. The act of sequencing, binding, and stitching becomes a way to intervene in these histories.” In Please Describe Your Pain and other projects, she continues, “I explore how bodies — especially those of women and gender-marginalized people — have been documented, medicalized, and archived.” She seeks to resist that by instead creating a record that is “more intimate, fragmented, and open-ended, aligning with experimental and artist-led publishing traditions.”
Please Describe Your Pain is part of “Translating from the Edges,” a show of artist books organized by artist Maria Markham and featuring work by Geoffrey Detrani, Les Finn, Heide Hatry, Bill Healy, Elena Kalkova, Ben Kue, Sonja Langford, Monika Lin, Mark Mulroney, Hafsa Nouman, Kate Quarfordt, Samantha Simpson, as well as a community book project by Kristin Eno — all nestled in the corner of the first floor of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art on Trumbull Street. “Artists act as translators of complex ideas and emotions that are not easily defined,” Markham writes in an accompanying statement. In the show, “artists use the artist book to explore their own process, create daily rituals of practice, or delve into themes of memory, ecology, the algorithm, identity, and pain. These works, in many forms, take the viewer on journeys to places they might normally never visit.”
Markham’s statement underlines the way the show feels like a collection of documents from a secret history, the stories beneath the stories. Heidi Hatry’s entries into the exhibit are inspired by “the saga of Flaco, the eagle-owl liberated from his tight enclosure at the Central Park Zoo into a world utterly alien to him, with no survival skills and untested instincts,” Harry writes. “He lived on his own in Central Park for nine months, before slowly venturing out to explore nearby buildings and neighborhoods. In February 2024, after a year in the ‘wild,’ Flaco collided with a window of an Upper West Side high-rise and died, his health, and perhaps his perceptual apparatus, compromised by rat poison and a bird virus that he’d ingested with his prey.”
Hatry developed her own relationship with Flaco during his months of freedom. “From the moment I learned of his ‘escape’ from the Central Park Zoo, I was captivated by the fortunes of Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl and took every opportunity I could find to put myself in his presence, which wasn’t especially difficult for quite a long time, as his preferred roost and hunting grounds were not very far from my apartment,” she writes. “I suppose that his freedom represented a pure and simple paradigm of liberation, and I felt that I could somehow usefully project my solidarity and hope on his behalf while absorbing something of his own animal majesty on mine.” She saw in his story an analogy to “the scarcely tenable ways of living that the cage of our social order has imposed upon us and the unextinguished ember of the instinct for freedom that still glows within us all in spite of that.”
She began making art about the bird “more or less from the inception of our relationship, often using the pellets he expectorated and their undigested contents as components of book-based assemblages: I suppose that the immemorial association of owls with wisdom subtly determined my choice of the book as the primary vehicle for the work.” She had been a bookseller in Germany for 20 years “before I was able to find my own way to freedom as a full-time artist in America, and far from resenting it as an instrument of my captivity, I always cherished the book, which I genuinely encountered only late in my adolescence, as the key to my release.” Her connection to Flaco also led her to muse that “although our relationship to nature has been thoroughly perverted we remain part of it, and even if that does not constitute definitive hope, it is objective evidence of something other than the hopelessness in which we are immersed.”
Some of the artists’ books come across almost as diaries of their artistic practice, as in page after page, you can see them trying out idea after idea. Some ideas get worked over in great detail; these exist side by side with other ideas that aren’t developed past sketches. But in each case, they give a sense of what the artists are working on, honing their interests and their skills. Tiny Portals, by Kate Quarfordt, “was a glimpse into my daily practice of making art in old books, approaching the page as a portal to a luminous dreamscape or a vividly re-imagined reality,” Quarfordt writes. “This body of work evolved at onset of the pandemic as a way to grapple with the expansiveness of our inner lives in a moment of isolation and dislocation.” Judging from the contents of the book she created, Quarfordt used the time alone to find layers of meaning, within herself and on the page.
Hafsa Nouman’s piece, Muhje Ghar Jana Hai?, meanwhile, is a poetic encounter with memories, and reminiscence of a house in particular in her native Pakistan. “It is the house, the home of our dreams, of my dreams, standing in the perfect sun of a cool summer breeze underneath the shade of the jamun and mango trees with bats circling its night skies, making me afraid to go to the chatt to witness the ever-present stars,” she writes. “These houses live detached from the world of the ever-existing mundane challenges of adulthood. Their memories are colored with childhood idolisation and romanticism, which makes them exist completely free from the tribulations that every such home has to face. In the case of 13-B, Lake Road, the tribulations are felt a bit too often as a barely audible, almost abstracted, vague vibration in the earth, caused by the Orange Line, pierces through nostalgia and wistfulness, letting foreboding silence take over. This anxiety stems from realising the impermanence of the house, of knowing how the environment in which the house is situated will force it to not exist. It makes one restlessly search for the familiar, which can be recreated and revisited often without physically inheriting the collection of the home. The familiar for me are the wrought iron patterns, which serve as totems and emblems, representing my grandmothers and with that the transcendental love, affection, patience, and acceptance they radiated. The intent was to archive and preserve these patterns by creating stencils of them, and allow one to revisit these homes, beyond the isolated memories of their existence, and answer honestly to the question—would I still want to live in this house?”
The question is fair because of the changes wrought to the neighborhood by development and by climate change, which has ravaged Pakistan in recent years. “As one ascends Lake Road from Jain Mandir, driving parallel to the Orange Line, right next to the Akbari store and car mechanic workshops, a metal gate leads into a beautiful pre-partition house, Abbas Mansion,” Nouman writes. “The house is sandwiched between a grey building on the left and a lush green lawn in front, which is often flooded by monsoon rains and frequented by mosquitoes, with Anjuman Madrassat-ul-Banat girls’ swimming pool on the right. At the back, its baramda and lawn are under heavy construction because a few months ago, they were forcibly taken by the government. Despite being surrounded by gigantomania, infrastructural development, land encroachment, and drainage and sewage problems, the home still stands gracefully in the middle.”
In their experiments with form, layout, and content, each of the artists pushes boldly at the definition of what a book can be. But in another sense, each artist remains true to the basic function we expect of all books. Nouman’s assiduous copying of wrought iron patterns, Quarfordt’s washes of color, Hatry’s owls, and Langford’s floating quotes are each, in their own way, preserving knowledge, and presenting it to us, their readers, to interpret and reinterpret, reflecting on the world and ourselves.
