One and Three Texts

A few years ago, I came across an article in a Pakistani English daily newspaper about investing in art. I was very intrigued by the language that it was using to speak about something I was very involved in. I made a clipping and stashed it away somewhere. Later, when I came across it, I was already thinking about issues of translation and ownership.
I created this work, in the tradition of one and three items by Joseph Kosuth. I used a photocopy of the clipping, a painting of the clipping made referencing a folded copy and lastly a phonetic transliteration of the article in Urdu. In the transliterated version, even if one is a reader of the Urdu script, the content becomes almost unintelligible. Moreover, because of phonetic traditions in transliteration, a reader is forced to adopt an exaggerated “local” accent.