PIECEMEAL TRANSLATION

Abstract

Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi's Glub (Hearts) of 2004, comprising an art film and a video installation, inquires into the Middle Eastern and North African practice of eating roasted sunflower, pumpkin and other seeds as it has taken hold in the city of Berlin. Bal has called the work an instance rather than an object of ‘cultural analysis’, the term that she has espoused for her critical practice. Cultural analysis engages its object in relation to theoretical concepts and socio‐cultural contexts without, however, reducing it to a case or illustration of either. This essay builds on the cultural analysis that Glub carries out by addressing the practice of seed‐eating, described by one commentator as a ‘social event and an art form’, in a number of frames. These frames overlap but do not amount to a comprehensive description of the work, adding to the density or ‘thickness’ of the object at stake. Initially, the work is considered in the context of Bal's recent academic work. Further, there is discussion of Glub's peculiar and strategic rendering of Berlinian ‘street life’, which both suspends and reinforces the recognizability of the contemporary Western metropolis. Finally, the article addresses the ways in which the work engages with the possibilities and pitfalls of the cross‐cultural translation of an everyday cultural detail.