b.1960, New York

“Cultural translation, like any other translation,” the artist Glenn Ligon says, “is always involved with loss, the untranslatable, excess meanings, the indecipherable.” Recognised for his language-based conceptualism, Ligon’s practice cleaves cultural representation from its pictorial and linguistic signs. He works against the assumed legibility of black bodies to explore African American identity and queer sexuality, gesturing to the inadequacies of representation, to the imperfect translation of lived experience in image and word. He borrows widely from literature and popular culture yet disrupts the call and response these familiar quotations inspire, the recognition and implied meaning they have come to signify. Ligon invites the viewer to look again, to see anew, to re-evaluate the implications of these shared symbols.