Experimental Canada 2011 Dialogue in English and Russian Mennonite (Plaut’dietsch), with no translation or subtitles 0:07:50
This work intervenes in video footage of a Russian Mennonite family gathering in 1980s southern Manitoba. Directly translated as ‘to have become English’, woa enjelsch looks at the locations between belonging and outsider, the liminal spaces within linguistic and cultural identities, and the contradictions of a static faithfulness to an eternally shifting culture.
Kandis Friesen is an interdisciplinary artist based in Montréal. Working with video, performance, drawing, installation, and sculpture, her practice looks at diasporic language, dispersed translations, and the role of document and archive in constructions of public memory and public space. Her work has been shown locally and internationally at various festivals and galleries, and she has been the recipient of several grants and awards, including a recent Canada Council for the Arts Film and Video Grant in 2016. Friesen holds a BFA from Concordia University, and is currently residing in Chicago while pursuing an MFA in the Art, Theory, Practice program at Northwestern University.