The Time-Travelling Circus: The Recent Return of Pablo Fanque and the Electrolier

Solo exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin. The floor of the Gallery is overlaid with an architectural floor plan that indicates the Brotherton Library Reading Room as an alternative physical space. In addition, a recording of the relative silence of the Reading Room is played alongside a densely layered wall text and a spoken word audio work on headphones. The audio narrative is compiled in multiple tenses and accrued perspectives. Continuing the overarching project’s research into the relationship between objects and words in the mind, the audience is invited to construct the work through a process of reading and listening, developing the imagined space, sustaining the characters and the dislocated transfiguring forms that feature in the work, including the chandelier/Electrolier and the Reading Room dome/circus big top.

The Time-Travelling Circus project is realised across a variety of media and locations. This work explores the production of imagined material situations, alongside the gathering of historical and circumstantial detail through a story that features William Darby (1810 – 1871). Also known as Pablo Fanque, this celebrated equestrian became the UK’s first black circus proprietor. Pablo’s first wife, Susannah Darby, died in 1848 when the circus collapsed, during a performance. Both are buried in St George’s Field, a small cemetery next to the Brotherton Library, at the centre of the University of Leeds. In Palmer’s project, the revolving acts and temporary edifices of the Time-Travelling Circus, are a refuge for dead or displaced performers who, ‘out of time and space’, remain suspended in the benign purgatory of their routines. When Pablo travels through time to find an alternative version of reality in which Susannah survives her accident, she re-materialises as the Electrolier (the chandelier) at the centre of the domed ceiling in the Brotherton Library, to where the narrative repeatedly returns.

Readers and listeners are invited to draw an analogy between the Library dome and a circus ‘big top’. Provided with a set of instructions, they undertake a sculptural reading process, constructing objects in their minds. The subversive circus context is exploited as an opportunity to experiment with different tempos and colliding voices. Attentive to the itinerant but recurring nature of circus edifices and performances, the project includes themes of memorialisation, re-enactment and the evocation of objects through storytelling.

Events associated with this exhbition include:
Artist Talk: Katrina Palmer in conversation with David Crowley, Head of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Temple Bar Gallery 22 February 2018
Time Travel - A Conversation: writer and researcher Nathan O'Donnell with Poet and physicist Iggy McGovern, Temple Bar Gallery, 3 April 2018

Press includes:
Review by Declan Long, Art Forum May 2018
Interview by Rachel Donnelly, Totally Dublin 31st March 2018
Review by Aidan Kelly-Murphy, This Is Tomorrow 27th March 2018
Review by Aidan Dunne, Irish Times 7th March 2018

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