Ibtisam Tasnim Zaman reading "Moving towards Home" by June Jordan in English and her translation of the poem in Arabic.

5th episode is broadcasting from New York where Mila meets Ibtisam and discuss the passing of knowledge and language through generations, crossing continents, writing poems and translating them from English to Arabic and vice versa, and you'll enjoy hearing some of them.

If you are interested in hearing the differences between translating poetry and working as a language interpreter for asylum seekers from the (in this case) translator's perspective, tune in!

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Ibtisam Tasnim Zaman is a Black Lesbian American Multidisciplinary intersectional feminist, self-taught artist. Her art practice consists of creative writing, spoken word poetry performance, narrative painting of BIPOC people, and community art projects. Her work draws inspiration from Persian Islamic geometric art, Indian classical art, surrealism, and magical realism. Originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ibtisam moved at age six to England, followed by the UAE. Her mother made the decision shortly after 9/11 to escape the violence that Muslims and BIPOC are still facing today. By thirteen, she would live between the UAE and India over the next nine years. Her work has been exhibited nationally with New York Health and Hospitals Arts and Medicine Program in collaboration with Residency Unlimited, funded by the Laurie M Tisch Illumination Fund. She has exhibited in group and duo exhibitions, and is currently completing a VOM residency through residency Unlimited. She has also performed her poetry for Ruckus, in NY. Internationally, Ibtisam has performed in theater productions in the UAE, and her work has featured in The Gender Bender Exhibition by The Sandbox Collective and the Goethe Institut, in Bangalore, India. Where she debuted her first narrative portrait, Al Awra The Intimate Parts.

She moved back to the states after receiving her Bachelor’s of Arts, with a triple major in Sociology, Economics and History, From Bangalore University in India. She now lives in NY, where she works as a full time artist, writer and linguistic interpreter.

https://ibtisamzaman.com/

The 4th episode of 'Broken English' brings Antonije Burić on board. If you're sensitive to bad language, stay away from the fire. We talk about swearing, insults, and expressing anger among other things.

We might both get canceled, but that's okay, we're doing this for the first time.

Episode 3 with Roshanak and Uroš is about the dog whistles politics where language is used as a weapon of othering, the poetics of everyday language such as signing, protest chants; and some of us learning what toponyms and odonyms are.

Together, they have worked on many curatorial, artistic, and publishing projects, and are, along with Mariam Kalandarishvili, founding members of the collective Center for Peripheries.

Uroš and Roshanak are currently working on a curatorial project The Other Side of Water which is showing at the Podroom Gallery in the Cultural Center Belgrade (Serbia), from April 14th to May 19th.

https://centerforperipheries.com/Impressum

https://theothersideofwater.com/Belgrade

Roshanak Amini is a visual artist currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. She was born in Iran and immigrated to Canada at the age of thirteen. Over the last 5 years Amini has focused on how art can enter into and impact the space of everyday life. Her belief in and commitment to the accessibility of art has inspired her to step outside of the gallery space and explore everyday spaces whether digital or physical spaces in which art can exist. Participatory art, artistic interventions, public installation and performative research have been central to her artistic practice. Roshanak considers making art as a way to respond to the world around her, to place some stones in the river in the hopes of slightly changing the course of the water.

Uroš Pajović is a researcher, art director, and curator. He perceives self-management and non-alignment as paradigmatic starting points for research around politics of space and international solidarity within the Third World, aiming to connect them to contemporary principles, and toward a hope for a global left. He loves signage in public space, Californian toponyms and odonyms, and crossing the street on red.

In this episode, we talk about writing, proofreading, editorial work, and the performative aspect of integrating (and allowing) different languages. We also talk about how to bring in personal narratives that don't necessarily fit into "pure" English.

From the perspective of sound, accents, and recordings, we ask what happens when all languages are broken, when you live between languages.

Angeliki Tzortzakaki (she/her) works as a writer, curator, editor, researcher and occasionally performer, between Athens, Amsterdam and her birthplace Vori in Crete. Her work appears in diverse formats and temporalities and overall looks at (ecofeminist) narratives that wish to defy the nature/culture binary. She is also researching agency, and the ability to speak and act for/within oneself as an individual or collective body. More specifically, she is interested in the mutability of insular landscapes and especially islands; through the 'archipelagic thinking', fiction, the tectonic, movement, ecologies of (self) organizations, friendships, and different forms of labour that Jane Bennet would otherwise call “vibrant matter”.

In the first episode, Endi and I talk about many aspects of the language, especially in relation to Eastern European feminism and its relationship to Western academia, or rather, its absence; and about negative stereotypes when it comes to Albanian territory, language, and history.

Endi Tupja is an artist, filmmaker/storyteller and cultural practitioner based between Berlin and Tirana. Her research is centered in experimenting with strategies of memory recuperation and the potential of re-enactment with time witnesses. She explores the limits of (self) representation as well as its tangential relation to video art. There is a friction between the essential and a sense of exaggeration omnipresent in her search for clarity. She continuously tries to challenge a certain idea of established institutional formality in artistic research and academic language.

Short introduction to the concept of the 'Broken English' podcast.