Anima Goyal is an artist based at the border of Haryana and Punjab. Through the format of bookmaking, her practice engages with the modes of translation and mistranslation, and the experience of a language as a space of inhabiting. In the past one year and a half, she has been working with the acts of (mis)reading which span the contexts and material histories of translated poetry, domestic spaces, institutional archives and personal documents. After finishing her bachelors in painting, she participated in a short residency at the Archives at NCBS and is about to continue her studies at Städelschule.

As part of her residency at Project_Space, Anima worked on continuing her visual investigations around language as a place that we inhabit, a concept that manifests through a search for home in her practice. Incorporating monotypes, charcoal drawings and text in English, French and Punjabi, her project worked with the very act of reading itself, and that of misreadings, messy and leaky translations that emerge from learning a new language.

Open Studio: Anima Goyal

Tuesday Lectures is an ongoing project by Anima that engages with the possibilities of translation arising through intimate acts of misreading and gathering. Locating itself in an untranslated medical text and the specificities of the reading room at FICA, it looked at our early experiences in learning a foreign language. As the resident, Anima took on the position of a translator who does not speak either of their known languages “well” and remains in a constant negotiation with meaning. When something is misread, it forms a third space that reveals parallel meanings existing behind a text, and here, translation becomes a lens, a mode of inhabiting.