Where: The Byre Theatre, St Andrews

When: 2/10/2024-28/10/2024

Project collaborators: Susan Diab, Fabien Arribert-Narce & Elise Hugueny-Léger

Description: ‘Palimpself’ is an exhibition of new visual artworks by the artist and academic Susan Diab exploring the relationship between language, memory, and materiality in the work of Nobel prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux. Designed for and displayed in the Byre Theatre’s foyers, it coincides with the first English-speaking conference on Ernaux’s works – Annie Ernaux’s Years: A Global Perspective (1974-2024) – as well as the School of Modern Languages’ Festival of Languages at the University of St Andrews.

The project is developed by Dr Élise Hugueny-Léger of the School of Modern Languages (St Andrews), in collaboration with Dr Fabien Arribert-Narce of the University of Edinburgh. It is supported by the University of St Andrews Impact and Innovation fund. The art display is free and open to all.

The exhibition: ‘Palimpself’ is a made-up word combining ‘palimpsest and ‘self’. A ‘palimpsest’ is a document where one text has been erased (literally ‘scratched out’) and another written over the top. Annie Ernaux considers the palimpsest as a way of thinking about a kind of knowledge where past and present overlap. At the end of her book The Years (Les Années) she calls it the ‘palimpsest sensation’ (‘la sensation palimpseste’).

For this project, Susan Diab steeped herself in Ernaux’s writings to enter her world, which felt so much like her own, collecting visual materials along the way. Objects found on the street, photos taken of things seen on daily walks around the artist’s neighbourhood or on her site-visit to St Andrews, words leaping off the page in French or in their English translation, which she combined and put into different arrangements in her studio.

The exhibition consists of ten giclée prints and five sculptural pieces of work, all conceived in relation to the physical space of the Byre Theatre in St Andrews and its history.

The exhibition guide can be downloaded here.

More information about the creative process can be found on the exhibition blog by Susan Diab. The photographs of the works included here are intended to give a general sense of the works which were on show in the exhibition ‘Palimpself’ in the context of the Byre Theatre.

 

 

Photo credit: Susan Diab & Alistair Kerr