CatharineClarkGallery

Nina Katchadourian's foreign-born parents, who have lived in the United States for over 40 years, both have distinctive but hard-to-place accents that the artist has never been able to imitate correctly (and have not inherited). Inspired by posters advertising courses in "accent elimination," Katchadourian worked with her parents and professional speech improvement coach Sam Chwat intensively for several weeks in order to "neutralize" her parents' accents and then teach each of them to the artist. The very existence of these courses points to the complexities of assimilation and self-image, and the tricky maneuvering between the desire to preserve the distinctive marks of one's culture, on one hand, and to decrease them in order to seem less foreign, on the other. In the video, Katchadourian's parents and the artist struggle to hear and imitate what is so close at hand and yet so difficult to access. The accent is treated very literally, like an heirloom, and the project illustrates the very awkward attempt to concretely transfer this elusive, and ultimately culturally determined, attribute.

This is a six-channel piece, with the front "talking head" monitors showing a synchronized conversation, scripted by Katchadourian's parents, which plays out first in their natural accents, and at the end in their "reversed" accents. The middle section consists of outtakes from practice sessions in the artist's studio, and has been edited to play with the patterning and repetition of various words.

Nina Katchadourian's foreign-born parents, who have lived in the United States for over 40 years, both have distinctive but hard-to-place accents that the artist has never been able to imitate correctly (and have not inherited). Inspired by posters advertising courses in "accent elimination," Katchadourian worked with her parents and professional speech improvement coach Sam Chwat intensively for several weeks in order to "neutralize" her parents' accents and then teach each of them to the artist. The very existence of these courses points to the complexities of assimilation and self-image, and the tricky maneuvering between the desire to preserve the distinctive marks of one's culture, on one hand, and to decrease them in order to seem less foreign, on the other. In the video, Katchadourian's parents and the artist struggle to hear and imitate what is so close at hand and yet so difficult to access. The accent is treated very literally, like an heirloom, and the project illustrates the very awkward attempt to concretely transfer this elusive, and ultimately culturally determined, attribute.

This is a six-channel piece, with the front "talking head" monitors showing a synchronized conversation, scripted by Katchadourian's parents, which plays out first in their natural accents, and at the end in their "reversed" accents. The middle section consists of outtakes from practice sessions in the artist's studio, and has been edited to play with the patterning and repetition of various words.

This work included as part of an exhibition of work by contemporary artists from the Armenian Diaspora in the Venice Biennale 2015.