ART 365: Liz Rodda
Liz Rodda, Norman, 2010/2011 (model for exhibition), color inkjet prints. Photo by Sherwin Tibayan.
depicts three separate fortune-tellers in Beijing, China, reading Rodda’s future. She hired a translator to interpret their predictions, so the videos, while in Chinese, feature English subtitles. “Last summer, I traveled to China for the first time,” she said. “I was giving a lecture at Redman University in Beijing, and I wanted to use the opportunity to create a new work. “I’ve always been interested in the belief of fate or predestination that is strong in Chinese culture. Some believe they can make the most of their fate by going to a fortune teller.”
Rodda visited three different fortunetellers who, taking into account her birth date, facial features and description of a recent dream, gave her three very different, contradictory predictions of her future. One teller told her she would encounter some sort of accident. “Their responses confirm how we can only speculate on what’s ahead,” Rodda said. “So my project references the limits of human understanding and how we think about the unknown.” The other interesting thing about the predictions is how much translation they had to travel through.
“First of all, it’s a dream, which is an interpretation of sorts,” Rodda said. “Then it was translated into Chinese and then back into English. So it’s gone through all these layers of translation.” To accompany the videos, Rodda created an inked flow chart that details the many possible courses of action she could take in response to the fortune-tellers’ predictions. “One prediction is that I may encounter some sort of accident,” she said. “I’m especially interested in that one because I have no control over it. Also, I was in a serious accident as a teenager, so, in a way, it’s like my continued on page 20
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