TRANSLATION SYSTEMS, 2025

Solo exhibition, rez gauche, Brussels. BE.

Installation with video and sculptures.

Zinc, isomalt, and paper.

 

 "I would always be trapped inside my confused and scattered tongues, my miniature Babel."

                                                                                                                                                      anton shammas, The Drowned Library, 2003.

 ​

In Translation Systems, Amit Leblang approaches the act of carrying meaning across languages not as a smooth transfer, but as a material and conceptual process. Can that fragile crossing be captured? Translation, here, is a tension between movement and halt, a way of navigating the porous borders between languages, materials, and belonging.

 

Speech welcomes us as we walk into the space. The language-landscape video weaves together idyllic countryside scenes with voices of particular travellers: translators. As these experts shed light on their often opaque work, moving images observe borders where nationalities and languages are supposedly shifting; invisibly yet undeniably. One border is situated right inside a village, on a small green path, where no checkpoint or flag indicates a shift. The artist tries, with the camera’s aid, to find the space and time of change. But this action is absurd at its core; we know there is no visual change, and no signage indicating the crossing. It is just a field, and they also speak French, German, or Dutch on the other side.

 

Fortune-tellers (cocotte en papier / קווה-קווה) pile up, hiding and accumulating drawings, scribbles, and fragmented thoughts in their folds: intimate moments that exist both inside and outside language. The origami shape has many names and functions as tangible acts of translation for various “originals”: bug catcher, salt cellar, chatter box, snapdragon, paku paku... It all depends on what our four translating-fingers produce in return. Seen en masse, they form a kind of unreadable archive, a non-linear script made of repetition.

 

Folded airplanes, metallic or transparent, rest in the space, connecting the vastness of a real aircraft to the intimacy of a handmade piece. Almost dissolving into their surroundings, they catch the light throughout the day, appearing and disappearing. These supposed-to-be-moving objects are now rendered fragile and heavy.

 

Translation Systems invites viewers into a landscape where meaning is in flux. Leblang’s works do not resolve translation, but stretch it, press on its thresholds, let it fail and reform.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Rune Pauwels, Yonatan Leblang, Andrea Kerstens, Nienke Fransen, Julien Jonas, Michal Luft, Máté Kohout, Wesley Meuris, and Petra Van Brabandt for their generous support, insight, and companionship throughout this project.

 

A special thank you to the translators who gave their time, voice, and perspective:

Yehoudah Shenhav-Shaharabani, Anne Vanderschueren, Michal Darmon, Kate Briggs, Yonatan Mendel, Emmanuel Nekic, Inge Floré, Imad Feghali, and anton shammas.