• The AL / MA gallery hosts an exhibition that questions the interpretation of signs and panels when one does not master the language and cultural codes.

  • Korean artist Mona Young-Eun Kim drew on her own experience when she arrived in France to design this amazing installation.

  • This exhibition "allows you to realize what it is to find yourself in a totally unintelligible environment", confides the director of the gallery.

Perhaps you have already found yourself, during a trip abroad, totally disarmed in front of a sign whose meaning you did not understand. Even more so if you do not master the alphabet used in this country. In the subway, in China, for example. This is the subject of Mona Young-Eun Kim's exhibition,

Dubbing,

to be discovered at the AL / MA gallery, in Montpellier (Hérault).

This Korean artist, known in Montpellier for having created the “melon” ceiling of the new Laissac halls, has designed an astonishing installation, at the AL / MA gallery, which questions the interpretation of signs and urban panels. To design this exhibition, Mona Young-Eun Kim was moreover inspired by her own experience, when she arrived in France in 2013. “I felt like I was the only one around me at not understanding the signs, confides the artist, a graduate of the School of Fine Arts in Montpellier. It always brought me back to the fact that I was a foreigner. When I arrived in Paris, I did not understand what the "M" of the metro was. For me, "M" was McDonald's. I thought there were McDonald's everywhere! "

“I often went to kebabs because I knew what I was going to eat!

"

So to get by in town, before learning French thoroughly, the young woman relied in particular "on the shape of the signs, which can give a clue", and the behavior of other users.

But above all, "to symbols".

“When I arrived, I often went to eat in kebabs,” continues the artist.

Because I knew what I was going to eat there, there is often a photo of the dishes on the sign.

In front of French cuisine restaurants, on the other hand, I did not understand.

"

When she was a student, Mona Young-Eun Kim searched, in vain, for universal symbols, which could solve this problem.

“They told me about Esperanto,” she continues.

But it's not really universal, if you don't master the alphabet A, B, C… I believe that a universal language is a bit utopian.

There is however Google Translate, "which has improved a lot in recent years", and which allows you to translate texts, when you are lost in a street, on the other side of the world.

On a street in China, Korea or Russia

At the AL / MA gallery, the artist has installed ten illuminated panels without any text, the shapes of which are reminiscent of tobacco shop signs or the Stop road sign. Thanks to an application, which can be downloaded from his smartphone or used from tablets available on site, visitors can project symbols from all over the world onto these panels. We find ourselves in a street in China, Korea or Russia.

"This allows you to realize what it is to find yourself in a totally unintelligible environment", decrypts Marie-Caroline Allaire-Matte, who heads the gallery.

You can also, with a virtual reality headset, find yourself in a strange neighborhood where all the symbols have been erased.

This exhibition questions, resumes the director, "the capacity that we have to understand our environment when we do not master the language or the visual or cultural codes".

From Wednesday to Saturday (2:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.), until October 30.

Free entry.

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