Complicity and Conspiracy in Film Translation

Dates: March 13-15, 2025

Location: AIF Auditorium

Complicity and Conspiracy in Film Translation is a film program that invites viewers to go through gestures of translation and subtitling in films, delving into the spaces of conspiracy and complicity they create between the spectators, the makers and that which is filmed. Taking the inevitable loss implicated in the act of translation as their starting point, the films in this program do not leave the space of subtitles unquestioned. They rather conceive them as a material to experiment with, producing multilingual experiences that negotiate with the demands for subtitles to remain legible and discreet.

Read the full curatorial text in Arabic, Armenian, English

The Arab Image Foundation engages with photographic objects through preservation, digitisation and research, as a ritual of care, of refusing disappearance. An aspect of our custodianship is translating images to words, creating entryways to access the collections. Indeed, like text, visuality has a lexicon that often requires translation.

In this process of translating image into text, a certain density, whether emotional or intellectual, is lost. Not just the loss that brought the photograph to us in the first place—the dislocation from the hands, the homes, the gestures that once framed it — but another loss, one that is quieter and subtler. Just as when a language is translated to another, a tongue is displaced to the mouth of an/other, the image no longer speaks in the language of light and shadow, of gaze and gesture, but in the language of words. There can be a virtue in the transition, however. The aspiration of translation is, after all, making understood that which is opaque, making worlds overlap, making worlds known.

In translating one language to another, one can do so word for word, but more is conveyed when doing so sense for sense, texture for texture. The same applies in our practice of translating images to text. Here is the added complexity: where in the image is the content to translate? And what words give rise to a visual world to be rendered legible? This is an ongoing exercise in review and reflection, in diction and nuance. It is a process of learning and embracing complexity.

Curated by Nour Ouayda | in collaboration with Dawawine and the Arab Image Foundation | Arabic translations by Ziad Chakaroun | Armenian translations by Araz Kojayan | English translations and proofreading by Francesco Anselmetti | Visual and publication designed by Hussein Nassereddine | Text reviewing to Sarag Pailian, Raffy Doulian and Mira Adoumier | Realized with the support of Mophradat’s Grant for Artists‘ Practice program | The collaboration between the AIF and Dawawine is supported by the "Reclaiming Our Commons: A Proposal for Cultural Collaboration Across the Arab Region” program, a partnership with Culture Resource, A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ettijahat-Independent Culture, Aflamuna, and L’art Rue Association.

The auditorium was made with the support of the Royal Norwegian Embassy, the Willian Talbott Hillman Foundation, and Stichting DOEN.