Alaa Abu Asad and Ulufer Celik started collecting common words from Arabic and Turkish when they studied together in 2016-2018. This project opened up to include words from folklore music, pop songs, stories that friends tell them, anecdotes, casual conversations in the streets they hear randomly, shop signs and windows, films and movies and subtitles, etc. In addition to collecting the familiar words, Alaa and Ulufer also include these resources as research material.
They made a book of the words, and on other occasions, they worked more site-specifically where they performed, played songs, played memory games, gave workshops, and designed picnic rugs, all around the familiar words, music, melody, and stories. For instance, in a recent exhibition in Serbia, they showed common words and their drawings on flags placed in a park in a city in Serbia, which included Arabic, Turkish, and Serbian together.
Especially in the collaboration work, I Love It When Translation Can Be Found To Agree With Our Weird Desires (2017-), Alaa and Ulufer have been showing new formats for presenting and sharing their project as an attempt to reflect on the geographies they come from and comment on their shared history. In the extension of their artistic practices, Alaa and Ulufer will use the LWT platform as their canvas to share their stories with various people from various places.
[First name] Alaa [surname] Abu Asad (عَلاء أبو أسعد) is an artist, researcher, and photographer. His practice is centred around developing alternative trajectories in which values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding can intersect. Language and plants are main themes in his research–based work, which takes form in writing, film and interactive installations.
Ulufer Çelik (b. 1992, Antalya/ Turkey) is an artist who lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands. She completed her studies in the MA Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute in 2018. Her artistic practice explores the potentialities of narrative and myth-making that is expressed through moving image, poetry, drawing, sound and performance. In her work, she constructs on multi-layered planes through a non-linear perception of time. She searches for queer, immigrant, feminist ways of making and thinking with the archeological, spiritual and spatial traces of memory. She is a member of Eat-House Collective, W1555 Artist Community and a resident at Putsebocht 3.