In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation

with Focal Point Gallery

Opening Hours

Wednesday to Saturday:
11am to 5pm

Free admission

This summer, join us at this major exhibition developed in collaboration with Focal Point Gallery. The exhibition brings together over 25 works, some of which have never been shown in a public gallery before, from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection.

The exhibition engages with the theme of translation — through storytelling and myth, history and memory, language and materiality — and features a newly commissioned audio installation and live performance by Haroon Mirza.

In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation considers translation as an act of movement and transformation. At a time when anything can seem open to interpretation, yet nothing appears to hold the exhibition asks: how do we engage with multiple perspectives without collapsing into relativism? How can we communicate across distances while still recognising differences? How do we engage with others — people, histories, ideas — without assuming full knowledge or easy equivalence?

The works in this exhibition show that to translate is not only to carry something across (the root meaning of the word), but also to expose its limits, its gaps and its generative possibilities. Translation is always partial, always unfinished, and in never being complete, it offers an ongoing commitment to the world and to others.

For the exhibition, Haroon Mirza presents the newly commissioned audio work and live performance, Adam, Eve, Others and a UFO for Choral Octet (2025), with a choir and actors from the local leading drama school, East 15. The audio work will be played at intervals in the gallery space, throughout the exhibition’s duration, instigating a dialogue between the works on view and this sonic intervention.

The live performance explores translation through sound, rhythm, performance and communal participation. By weaving together voices that translate electrical signals into voiced notes, Mirza’s commission makes translation a live and participatory process, one that reveals the endless possibilities of the human voice.

Translation shapes how we engage with the past, how we navigate inherited narratives and how we attempt to understand one another. Anselm Kiefer, Michael Armitage, George Condo and Ellen Gallagher, amongst others, explore how myths and stories shift with each retelling. Their works invite us to reconsider how stories, from oral traditions to the Bible, are continually reshaped, revealing that meaning is never fixed but always in flux. Here, translation is not about preserving a singular meaning but about keeping stories alive, expanding their possibilities rather than resolving them.

Other artists, including Nika Neelova and Louise Bourgeois, consider translation as a way of engaging with history, memory and loss. Their work examines how histories are fragmented, buried and resurfaced, where what is lost in one form might reappear in another. These works remind us that history is not simply a fixed narrative but an ongoing act of responsible interpretation, shaped by what is remembered and what remains untranslated.

Beyond stories and history, the exhibition questions the limits of language itself, looking at how experiences can never be fully captured. Pierre Huyghe, Antoni Tàpies, Simon Fujiwara and others explore moments where gaps in understanding become spaces for invention. Artists including Romany Eveleigh and David Birkin extend this beyond words, revealing how meaning moves through gesture, rhythm and touch — forms of communication that exist outside dominant linguistic structures. Their works suggest that what remains untranslated is not necessarily lost but becomes another way of carrying experience across cultures, generations and histories.

In a time of misinformation, contested histories and unstable narratives, this exhibition reminds us that translation is never neutral. It is an active, interpretive process that shapes how we relate to the past, to others and to the world around us. Rather than dissolving meaning into infinite perspectives, the artists in this exhibition show that translation, whether of a text, an image, a sound or a memory, is always an act of making, of bringing something into a different form where new possibilities emerge. Translation is not a way of making everything the same, but of making differences communicable — however imperfectly, however incompletely. As the artists in this exhibition show, to translate is to commit to the world and to one another, even and especially in the face of uncertainty.