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Portrait of ALAA ABU ASAD and ULUFER ÇELIK. All images courtesy the artists unless otherwise stated.
In 2016, after meeting during their master’s studies at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem, multimedia artists Ulufer Çelik and Alaa Abu Asad began compiling and illustrating words that pointed to commonalities between Turkish and Palestinian Arabic, their respective mother tongues. Some of the words are identical in pronunciation and meaning, some are similar, and some are homophonous but mean different things. Their ever-growing list turned into an ongoing project titled I love it when translation can be found to agree with our weird desires (2017– ), spanning live performance, video, sound, and an award-winning book that was published in 2020. In this interview, the Rotterdam-based artists discuss their close collaboration, the act of translation, and the empowering potential of their expansive project.
How did you become interested in identifying common or similar words in your languages?
Ulufer Çelik: We don’t know each other’s languages at all, but when we first met [at the Dutch Art Institute] we knew the geographies of our areas, and we knew that there are some common words between the languages. It hurts me, why these geographies that are very near to each other need to talk in English, a language that is so far away. With that motivation, we started to ask each other, “What do you call this?” And then little by little—first with food and then the objects that we carry—we started to build up a daily language that we can find in between that is common for both of us. We found five words in the beginning then built it up, and it turned into a project.
Alaa Abu Asad: We speak English together but we also mix in Arabic and Turkish words for specific terms. It’s a friendly way of speaking between us—an intimate and funny way.
UÇ: Sometimes the word we need doesn’t exist in English.
What’s your collaborative process like?
AAA: There’s no hierarchy; we divide things between us but we’re also both involved in everything, which includes collecting the words. We never stop collecting the words because they come from our daily lives. If a certain situation or thing reminds me of a word and I think, “This might be in common with Turkish,” I’ll write it down on my phone and ask Ulufer. The words can also come from Arabic or Turkish songs, or conversations I hear between Turkish people in the Netherlands. I might pick [an Arabic] word that I think comes from Turkish because the root is unfamiliar.
So we have a list of all these words and then we sort through them. As Ulufer said, this started from five words and now we have something like 280.
If we want to give a drawing to a word, we do it together. It’s quite interesting because Ulufer comes from an architecture background and I come from art, so our drawing skills are different. We really want to affect each other’s ways of drawing, so I’ll take Ulufer’s drawing and add something to it, and she’ll take mine and “fix” it, and so forth. Designing the book was the same, we decided everything together.
UÇ: When I’m introducing the book to people, they’re always coming up with words that aren’t in it, so I write those down too.
In the drawing phase, we accumulate some words and sit together in a session of three to four hours, drawing and talking.
AAA: One more thing: this project focuses on vernacular Arabic, not the formal kind. We are interested in how people speak in daily life. The thing is, if you look up this commonality between Turkish and Arabic, most of the research available is very linguistic or literary or religious; it’s very seldom that you will find any references going back to the spoken language. Our work is different because it comes from lived experience.
The project seems to rest on gaps in translation and comprehension—between Palestinian Arabic and Turkish, and then between the text and its pictorial representation. Why are you drawn to examining these uncertainties and lapses?
AAA: There are similarities but also unfamiliarities between the words. After we collect the words we start to see what we can do with them. First, can we draw this word? This depends on if it’s an object, like “door,” or if it’s [abstract, like] “love.” Then we see which words have the same meaning; which ones have similar-ish meanings; and which are false friends—the same word but with completely different meanings in the two languages. We were interested in these because they are also accompanied with stories. For instance, “date,” the fruit, is tamr in Arabic, but in Turkish it’s hurma, which is “woman” in Arabic; there’s a funny story about this that a friend told us [more on this below].
We are also interested in these unfamiliarities between words because we don’t believe that there is one meaning of everything. We would like to emphasize these multi-meanings, multi-understandings, different priorities and ways of communicating. If the word has two meanings or more we might provide more drawings. Translation is not unidirectional; it’s a lived experience, how we communicate and how we translate, whether linguistically or visually, etcetera. We want to open up the understanding of the words. That’s why we didn’t add the English meaning of each word.
UÇ: We also enjoy the multi-potentialities that the translation provides. For example, even for the most basic word, let’s say araba, which means “car” in Turkish, we don’t want to draw a car on four wheels. We like to play in our minds with what a car can be for us. Let’s draw a shopping cart because we always go shopping together in the supermarket and that can be our “car.” We don’t want to give the first, most mainstream meaning for every word. We like to think about it and play with what would be more meaningful in terms of our friendship.
AAA: Also, people who don’t speak Arabic or Turkish necessarily are going to encounter this book. What does it mean for them? How can you open up a conversation with the lack of English? We give a frame of what this book is about in the blurb, but then we leave it very loose inside for each reader to have their own experience and understanding.
Some pages are left blank. Why?
UÇ: That comes from wanting to make this book accessible as an activist tool. We were always planning to leave some pages blank and let people draw what the words mean for them if they want to. But also some words are undrawable.
AAA: Or we simply didn’t feel like drawing the word; we followed our intuition. But as Ulufer said, we didn’t want to close this work.
Could you elaborate on how this project functions as an activist tool? How does it engage with the intersection of language and power?
AAA: Language is about exclusion and inclusion. It’s a very political tool whether we like it or not. It’s fraught with politics, and [issues of] communication and relationships, not only on the individual level but also collective and national. I don’t think we can provide a solution other than being motivated to try and open things up.
Also, we know some words are offensive. We know these words are used to represent us, and we don’t want to be represented through racist or offensive or hate-speech words. But we are well aware of their existence within the language because language is not neutral. So how do we deal with them?
UÇ: I would like to add that our countries are separate from each other, but there are spaces in between, like the borderlands or refugee camps, where both of these languages are common, and the people who speak them exist together but can’t communicate at all. We wanted this book to go to those kinds of spaces, to kids who can use this book and see how many common words they have so they feel less alienated.
AAA: Especially with Arabic, because it is not written in the Latin alphabet. Turkish transformed from using the Arabic alphabet into the Latin one to be more connected to the West, to Europe. This hasn’t happened with Arabic, so it’s like this statement of alienation within the appearance of the language itself. Immigrants especially have to integrate in Western communities or environments in a way that erases their mother tongue. So we are trying to encourage people not to be scared or alienated, to stand and speak up. We are regaining the Arabic language in a way. It’s also an attempt to secularize Arabic as we’re using the vernacular form, and de-estrange people who use these words in their daily life.
UÇ: We won [the Zurich-based VOLUMES Award] this year, and with the award we would like to send the book to refugee camps in Greece and Turkey. But we work mostly with invitations from art spaces, so when the right time comes we would like to go to those places personally.
AAA: We would like to contribute this book as a tool for someone who would like to activate this project in their own way, like building a workshop. We’re very interested in inviting more people to be involved in this project so that it travels but then differentiates.
UÇ: In Rotterdam there are so many Turkish and Arab communities too, so we also work more locally in terms of workshops.
The project is also activated through installations and performances. What are your thoughts on the different modes of engaging with this project? Do you find that certain forms are able to reveal or more clearly articulate certain ideas or themes? The inclusion of your vocalizations in performance, for example, enables the audience to hear the similarities and differences in pronunciation, which is another way of experiencing the shifts between the two languages.
AAA: I think it depends on the receiver, or the reader, or the viewer. Each way of presenting the book is equally important, and it requires different engagement and preparation from us. But it’s also very important to us how we say these words out loud, because we are interested in the minor nuances in speech. They aren’t the same between me and Ulufer, but nor are they the same between someone from the north of Palestine and somebody from the south or center. We like these small details and slippages of the tongue, things you can only emphasize in the speaking of the words.
UÇ: The performance is one aspect of the words, but the book also has an audio version. In the first exhibition of this book, in Vienna, we included the sound piece of us reading the words aloud. Some visitors recognized the words and approached us, but they didn’t know about the book. The sounds invited them to listen more and engage.
AAA: Often non-Arabs or non-Turkish will come up to us and tell us about words that are similar in Hindi, or Greek, or Italian. I find this an empowering factor for the project.
What are your favorite entries or surprising stories behind the words?
AAA: We’re interested in collecting these stories because they are not written anywhere; it’s like an oral history, and the more we engage with the words and with people, the more stories we get. There is one about salt, which is tuz in Turkish. But in Arabic that has a completely different meaning. It’s like “whatever.” It’s a colloquial word that doesn’t have a meaning and doesn’t exist in formal language. Only in very specific regions in the Arab world, like the Levant, would you say “طُزّ [tuz]” which means “whatever, fuck off, I don’t care.” It’s because the area was under Ottoman rule for 400 years and people were subject to paying tax on their crops, but if you produced salt, you weren’t taxed for it according to Ottoman law. So people would hide their crops of sesame and other seeds with piles of salt, and when the Ottoman tax collector came to their storages people would just open the gate, show the pile of salt, and they would say “طُزّ يا فندم [tuz ya fandim]” which means “it’s only salt, sir.” That’s the way people were tricking the system and not paying tax, and from there the words became a way to belittle your enemy or underestimate the person who is threatening you. That’s why now you say “tuz, I don’t care.” I think this story is interesting because it also tells the history of the place.
UÇ: And with the dates, it’s a tradition in Turkey for hajjis, pilgrims who visit Mecca, to come back with dried dates for their families. But they would get there and say, “We are looking for dates, hurma, hurma,” and the Arabs would think they were looking for women.
AAA: How could you go for pilgrimage and ask for a woman?! There are other words that are unintentionally sexualizing. Tajawuz, for instance, in Arabic means “bypassing,” like if you’re overtaking someone or something. It’s not at all sexual, but in Turkish it’s sexually violent.
UÇ: It means “rape.”
AAA: Or nikah, for instance, means “sexual intercourse” in Arabic, but in Turkish it’s “marriage.”
UÇ: Yeah, the ceremony of marriage.
AAA: So sometimes it can be disturbing!
ALAA ABU ASAD and ULUFER ÇELIK, I love it when translation can be found to agree with our weird desires, published by Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, 2020.
What are your plans for this project?
UÇ: We are trying to distribute the book as much as we can to bookshops and all around the world. On the other hand, we keep collecting new words—maybe in two years we will do a second book, building up from another point of view.
In the beginning, we thought of this as a film project, a glossary or a dictionary but in a video format, and we have a little excerpt of our video trial. I think we would like to go in that direction and see what the film medium can provide us.
AAA: Also, it’s important to say that we are becoming more selective or aware of how this book can function, and where. We’re interested in activating the book locally in the places where we work, but also locally in Palestine and Turkey. It’s a very small edition, so that’s why we’re keen on distributing this book ourselves to people or places where we think there is a potential to change or build up a relationship with the place or the people, and take this project further. We really think deeply about what this invitation or this place would bring to us and to the book. As Ulufer said, we want this book to be an activist tool, not only a book on the shelf. So that’s why we think about the community of the place, about who the audience is and what it means. This can be an art project, a book, an opening for many possibilities, and we try each time to engage differently and accordingly.
I love it when translation can be found to agree with our weird desires by Ulufer Çelik and Alaa Abu Asad. Published by Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, 2020.
Ophelia Lai is ArtAsiaPacific’s associate editor.
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