Boklansering
Book Launch: Saskia Holmkvist / Margaret (Back Translation)
A public conversation will take place at Norma T between Saskia Holmkvist, Nkule Mabaso, Manuel Pelmus and Mike Sperlinger the 9th of September at 6 pm.
Saskia Holmkvist's monograph evolves around her research Back Translation funded by DIKU which became amongst other the film Margaret (Back Translation). The film involves a dialogue that speaks back to the evanescent nature of a past performance, acting as a filter through which to create new memories. The book acts in similar ways, in connecting an idiosyncratic journey to a film. The film weaves together staged scenes, documentary elements and archival footage, exploring the recent history of Belfast through a series of tonally diverse scenes, by turns comic, elegiac and speculative.
Expanding beyond the screen, the publication brings together a constellation of perspectives—artistic, theoretical, and political—that deepen the conversation around translation, historical erasure, and mediation. It gathers texts mainly of a group of persons that were invited as part of a research group which were Sara Eliassen, Sue-Ann Harding, Temi Odumosu and Manuel Pelmuş. Other texts in the book are written by Alice Butler, Suzanna Chan, and a dialogue between Saskia Holmkvist and Jan Verwoert, creating a context around the film and its broader artistic research concerns.
Editor: Corina Oprea
Published by: Mount Analogue and Slimvolume 2025
Welcome!
Saskia Holmkvist is an artist and professor at the Art Academy at KHiO. For over two decades Holmkvist has worked using video, performance, and text alongside new approaches to relational work and oral archives that encompass critical listening, speculation and performative translation. She has a particular focus on contemporary history, translation processes, and ethics.
Holmkvist's practice is concerned with the limits of translation, exploring how new interactions can reshape relations and historical trajectories. Her work combines aspects of ethnography and theatre to create films and performances that relate through past artworks, language, and political movements. This serves as a source from which she abstracts to speak back through gestures, staged scenes, documentary elements and sonics into the newly mediated narrative memories which form the aesthetic and theoretical fabric of her practice.
