Open AccessAnton Kannemeyer's Tactics of Translation as Critical Lens
Author(s) -
John A. Tyson
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
synthesis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1791-5856
pISSN - 1791-5155
DOI - 10.12681/syn.17286
Subject(s) - comics , space (punctuation) , subject matter , white (mutation) , visual arts , literature , aesthetics , art history , history , art , linguistics , psychology , chemistry , philosophy , pedagogy , biochemistry , curriculum , gene
Anton Kannemeyer (b.1967) is a white Afrikaner artist whose work engages with translation: subject matter culled from historical archives, comics, and the mass media is transposed into different languages, artistic mediums, and styles. Kannemeyer's artworks use translation as a means of returning to and interrogating traumatic, historical events. The beholder is prompted to (re)engage painful aspects of the past, approached from the critical distance allowed by the deferral implicit in translation. By re-encountering history in the gallery, the viewer must confront her memory and reconcile or interrogate disjunctions proposed in the space of Kannemeyer's work. Thus, with the re-imagining of events as translations in a new language, there is the possibility for a renewed investigation of received histories and a working over of traumas of the past.