Translating my art into Arabic turned out to be about much more than words. Somewhere between language, art and faith, the translation became unexpectedly personal. And it made me look at my own paintings from a slightly different direction.
A little while ago, I wrote about my slightly obsessive project of translating my artist website into more and more languages — and what happens when your own words suddenly begin to sound different in French, Japanese, Hebrew or Finnish. I thought Arabic would simply be the next language on the list. It wasn’t.
This one became more personal.
There is something slightly strange about seeing your own words in a language you cannot fully read.
I have been translating my artist website into more and more languages lately. French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew and several others have gradually found their way onto the site.
And now, my Arabic artist introduction is online.
At first, it was simply another translation.
It didn’t remain that way for very long.
A language that was already somewhere in my life
Arabic is different for me because it isn’t entirely unfamiliar.
I don’t speak Arabic, and I certainly wouldn’t pretend that I do. But for years I have encountered the language through my reading and study of the Quran.
I pray in the morning. I read the Quran. I have spent a great deal of time thinking about faith, Christianity and Islam, and about the places where they meet – and where they don’t.
None of that makes me a religious artist.
I don’t think of my paintings that way.
But it does mean that Arabic already carried associations for me long before I decided to put it on an art website.
Until now, I had mostly encountered those letters in a religious context.
Then suddenly they were standing beside my paintings.
That felt surprisingly different.
أندي رينارد
Even my own name became a small adventure.
How exactly do you write Andy Renard in Arabic?
Names don’t simply translate. They have to travel from one sound system into another. And apparently one tiny letter can become rather important when the artist in question insists that the final d in Renard really is pronounced.
Eventually I became:
أندي رينارد
I rather like him.
He seems familiar.
The human figure and another tradition
There is another reason why putting my figurative art into an Arabic context made me think.
I paint people.
Faces. Bodies. Sometimes nudity. Sometimes sensuality. Fear, humour, loneliness, religion, sexuality, death and all the other peculiar things that come with being human.
The representation of living beings has, of course, a long and complicated history within Islamic thought and Islamic cultures.
I know enough about the subject to know that it cannot honestly be reduced to a sentence saying simply that images are “allowed” or “forbidden”.
And I have no intention of settling centuries of theology in a blog post on an artist’s website.
I am a painter, not a theologian.
But I find the tension interesting.
Art has always travelled between cultures that did not necessarily agree about what art should be, what it should show, or even what its purpose was.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons art needs to travel.
Translation is not just replacing words
This became particularly obvious with Arabic.
I didn’t want an Arabic version of my website that merely worked. I wanted it to sound as though it belonged to a living language.
Not artificially formal. Not archaic. Not as though my paintings had somehow been translated by a government department.
And certainly not as though I suddenly wanted to present myself as someone else simply because the reader happened to be Arabic-speaking.
The paintings are still the same paintings.
I am still the same Swedish artist sitting in Småland making them.
But the language around them has changed.
And language changes the room in which we encounter an image.
A sentence can become softer in another language. A word can carry associations that its English equivalent does not. Even the direction in which we read changes. On the Arabic version of the site, the page itself begins on the other side.
I find that beautiful.
Not every Arabic speaker is Muslim
There is an obvious distinction worth making.
Arabic is not Islam, and Islam is not Arabic.
The Arabic-speaking world includes Muslims, Christians, people of other faiths and people with no particular religious faith at all. And most of the world’s Muslims are not Arabs.
So this translation is not an attempt to create an “Islamic version” of my art.
There isn’t one.
It is simply an invitation to another enormous linguistic and cultural world to come inside and have a look.
You don’t have to see what I see.
You don’t have to believe what I believe.
You don’t even have to like the painting.
But now, at least, we have a language in which we can disagree.
The same paintings, seen from another direction
When I started translating my website, I thought mostly in practical terms.
People search in their own languages. Google understands languages. A Swedish artist with an international website should probably make it possible for more people to find his work.
All perfectly sensible.
But somewhere along the way, the project became more interesting than SEO.
Every new language changes the site a little.
Arabic changed it more than most.
Perhaps because I already had a relationship with the language without really knowing it.
Perhaps because seeing Arabic beside my paintings connected two parts of my life that had previously occupied rather different rooms.
Or perhaps simply because this still fascinates me:
A painting made in a small studio in Småland can leave Sweden without moving an inch.
Now it can speak Arabic too.
مرحباً
Welcome.