Please join us for the next meeting of the Experiential Translation Online Seminar for talks by Danica Maier on "Shifting Perspectives: Applying Intersemiotic Translation to Enable Aspect Seeing through Unrepeating-repeats in a Contemporary Art Practice" and Emily Butler on "Towards a curatorial translation zone".

The seminar is free and open to all, but please register so we can send you the Zoom link.

More about the ETOS here. 

Abstracts:

Shifting Perspectives: Applying Intersemiotic Translation to Enable Aspect Seeing through Unrepeating-repeats in a Contemporary Art Practice
Danica Maier, Nottingham Trent University

This presentation explores how hand-drawn repetition, inspired by historical textiles and transformed through intersemiotic translation, fosters embodied audience engagement. Grounded in a recently completed PhD by Creative Works (2025), the research spans six bodies of artwork (2014-23) that reimagine textile processes by bridging drawing, writing, and site-specific practice.

Within the practice-research textiles function as active agents in translation, expanding their role beyond materiality into dynamic, interdisciplinary dialogues. Drawing on Roman Jakobson’s (1959) concept of intersemiotic translation and contemporary explorations by Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal (2019) and Lee (2022), this research explores how textile processes are translated into drawn textual forms. While textiles have long been studied in cultural contexts, their capacity as catalysts for translation remains underexamined. A further aspect is the “unrepeating-repeat”: iterative variation that disrupts repetition to provoke perceptual shifts. This technique enables aspect seeing, (Wittgenstein 1953/2010), inviting viewers to encounter moments of discovery where the familiar transforms, revealing multiple perspectives.

This presentation outlines how intersemiotic translation, aspect seeing, and the unrepeating-repeat form a cohesive and unique framework for artistic creation. The unrepeating-repeat fosters attentive exploration; aspect seeing activates shifts in perception; and intersemiotic translation expands meaning across modes. This integrated approach transforms the audience’s experience into an active, participatory process, offering a novel understanding of how artistic frameworks can foster embodied discovery.

Towards a curatorial translation zone
Emily Butler, Reading University

Emily Butler presents a summary of her article “Towards a curatorial translation zone”. In it, she argues that in a globalizing world, the act of translation is potentially everywhere (Bassnett 2014; Blumczynski 2016, in Vidal 2022). It involves a creative process of transfer, interpretation, and transformation across sign systems, cultures, and worldviews – an act with profound socio-political implications. Within the visual arts field, it describes the practice of artists and curators who work increasingly internationally as ‘material-semiotic actors’ (Haraway 1988: 595), engaged in renegotiating semiotic and cultural frameworks while questioning the socio-political status quo. Yet, what are the limits of translation? What is lost or gained in this “necessary but impossible” act (Spivak 2022: 69)? Who translates in ‘power-differentiated’ contexts (Haraway 1988: 579-80)? This article outlines how artists and curators explore the possibilities and limits of translation within contemporary art to put forward the poetics of the untranslatable (Cassin 2014; Glissant 1990). It develops the concept of (mis)translation and positions the curatorial space as a translation zone (Apter 2006) – a dynamic, impermanent site of semiotic and cultural renegotiation, where hybrid languages, new forms, knowledges and relations can emerge (Bhabha 1994). In doing so, it embraces a ‘kaleidoscopic totality’ of world views (Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1990).

Speakers:

• Dr. Danica Maier is an artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her artistic research explores intersemiotic translation across drawing, textiles, and text, using the “unrepeating-repeat” to foster perceptual shifts. Working through site-specific installations, performance, and collaborative research, she invites slow looking and embodied engagement. Collaborate projects include Bummock: Artists in Archives, Score: Mechanical Asynchronicity, Returns, and Smatterings. Her recent published research appears in JAR (Journal of Artistic Research), TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture, the Journal of Research in Arts and Education, among others.
• Emily Butler is a freelance curator and writer. She is also a PhD researcher in Curating at the University of Reading / OnCurating Academy, Berlin, on the topic of artists and curators as (mis)translators, as they work increasingly across borders, between languages, sign systems and cultures. Previously, she served as Head of Programmes at the Contemporary Arts Society in Vancouver, Platform Talks Curator at Art Toronto (2024), and Conversations Curator at Art Basel (2021–2023). From 2010 to 2022, she was a curator at Whitechapel Gallery in London. She has also held roles in the Visual Arts team at the British Council, Antony Gormley Studio, and the Centre Pompidou. She contributes to international publications, and has been a visiting lecturer at Emily Carr University, Royal College of Art, OnCurating Academy and London Metropolitan University.