Curating Art: My Mother’s Language

My Mother’s Language is the fifth part of the collaboration between Accelerator and the International Master’s Programme in Curating Art at Stockholm University. The students create events in connection to themes that Accelerator wishes to highlight in the exhibition programme. My Mother’s Language is curated by Ellen Klintenberg Gedda and Onur Çimen. Taking Johanna Gustafsson Fürst’s interest in social, political and emotional aspects of language as a starting point, they present an evening that focuses on multilingualism in relation to identity and power.

“My mother’s language cuts against my mouth, as though my mouth remembers how ashamed I used to be of speaking our language in front of others. Now that I’d like to bring it back into my mouth, my mouth won’t let me”, the narrator says in Serbocroatian. Experiences of the role that language plays in shaping one’s own identity and the political and structural conditions of that process, as illustrated in Shapeshifters, is the focus of the evening, discussed through the lens of art as well as the current research in the field.

The evening begins with a conversation between artist Sophie Vuković and Carla Jonsson, Associate Professor at the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism at Stockholm University, followed by a screening of Shapeshifters (85 min). The film serves as a point of departure for the conversation as it portrays a sense of belonging beyond national borders by using language both as material and subject matter.