By Morag Colquhoun, Artes Mundi Live Guide
My surname is Colquhoun. From early childhood on I remember spelling my name out C-O-L-Q-U-H-O-U-N and pronouncing it for people ('Cahoon'). I knew that our name signified difference that I needed to explain ('it's a Scottish name').
One of our first jobs as Artes Mundi Live Guides was to learn how to pronounce the artists' names (Adrian Paci is 'Pat-si' in Albanian - not 'Patch-i' which is Italian). I listened to a radio programme the other day about a young Turkish woman's experience of UK immigration. I knew how she would pronounce her name to the immigration official because I have learned that the 'g' is silent in Ergin Cavusoglu's surname.
One of the first things that I spotted in Fernando Bryce's artwork 'Die Welt' ('The World') was the name 'Colquhoun' on a turn of the century book cover copied in pen and ink. Was this a colonial era ancestor of mine who wrote 'The Mastery of the Pacific'?
Other things in 'Die Welt' have caught the attention of others. The map showing the Persian (Iranian) city a museum assistant was named for. The grandfather who showed his grandsons the French newspaper heading that told of British troops entering Baghdad. Only it wasn't the recent conflict. This newspaper was dated 1917 and his cousins from Dinas Powys had been there!
Fernando Bryce has described his work as a 'museum of the gaze'. Many gazes, not just a western-centric gaze. This is true of 'Die Welt' and it is also true of Artes Mundi, this year selected by a Russian and a Turkish curator.
In Olga Chernysheva's video, 'Russian Museum', we gaze at the relation between Russian people and the paintings they gaze at. When we gaze at the artworks in Artes Mundi we bring our own experiences and we encounter more.
When I told Chen Chieh-jen how entranced Welsh children were by his film 'Factory', he was pleased. When I told him Welsh children had said that the film had made them think he said (speaking through an interpreter): 'that is the most important thing!'
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