Saskia Holmkvist
Margaret (Back Translation)

This monograph centres on Saskia Holmkvist's recent film Margaret (Back Translation), which weaves together staged scenes, documentary elements and archival footage, exploring the recent history of Belfast through a series of tonally diverse passages, by turns comic, elegiac and speculative. It involves a dialogue that speaks back to the evanescent nature of a past performance, acting as a filter through which to create new memories. The book operates in a similar way by expanding the film’s idiosyncratic journey beyond the screen, bringing together a constellation of perspectives – artistic, theoretical, and political – that deepen the conversation around translation, memory, and historical mediation. It includes texts by Alice Butler, Suzanna Chan, Sara Eliassen, Sue-Ann Harding, Temi Odumosu, Manuel Pelmuş, Saskia Holmkvist, and Jan Verwoert, to create a rich and layered context around the original work.

Saskia Holmkvist (1971) is an artist based in Stockholm. She is also a teacher and, since 2014, professor in fine art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. For over two decades Holmkvist has worked using video, performance, and text alongside new approaches to relational work and oral archives that encompass critical listening, speculation and performative translation. She has a particular focus on contemporary history, translation processes, and ethics. Holmkvist's practice is concerned with the limits of translation, and explores how new interactions can reshape relations and historical trajectories. Her work combines aspects of ethnography and theatre to create films and performances that relate through past artworks, language, and political movements. This serves as a source from which she abstracts to speak back through gestures, staged scenes, documentary elements and sonics into the newly mediated narrative memories which form the aesthetic and theoretical fabric of her practice.

Edited by Corina Oprea

Designed by Jonas Williamsson

Hardback, 162 pages, 45 colour illustrations, 33 b+w illustrations, 167mm x 240mm.

This book is co-published with Mount Analogue

ISBN: 978-1-910516-33-1 

This title will be published on 9 September 2025