Cultural translation and the immigrant artist: Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi’s works in context

Abstract

ABSTRACT Grounded in contemporary translation studies, this article offers insights into the way translation links with multimodality and art to display the experience of migration. Its main contribution to the discipline is exploring these issues from the perspective of cultural translation – a concept that applies to the transformation of individuals and entire groups when they encounter otherness. Our case study is a selection of works by the Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi who emigrated from Ukraine to Israel during the mass immigration from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. In her art, which reflects a navigation between conflicting identities, she articulates the experience of “translated” women and men (to use Salman Rushdie’s coinage). While examining her works through the prism of cultural translation, we explore several issues: the manipulation of stereotypes of the “other”; the transformation of people, especially in relation to immigration; the involuntary sharing of space; and hybridity.