மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference

In brief

Dates - 24 June to 30 September

Venue - Talbot Rice Gallery

In brief- A series of twenty individual text works by Hephzibah Israel (University of Edinburgh), commissioned by Talbot Rice Gallery and produced in collaboration with Fraser Muggeridge studio. This exhibition runs in collaboration with the Edinburgh Art Festival during the month of August.

About the event

'the nature of difference' is informed by Hephzibah Israel’s own lived experience, which she describes as being on the margins of multiple communities.

Through each text, presented as poster vignettes in individual bays of the Georgian Gallery balconies, Israel poses questions "In your language or mine?" and prompts us to consider our own perceptions of borders. Layering languages, she creates patterns - playfully employing the notion of translation as repetition. She delights in the ways the three languages and scripts relate to each other and to punctuation. Playing with punctuation offers space to think, invites us to insert further meanings, and is a reminder that its modern forms were introduced to Indian languages with European contact.

About the artist

Hephzibah Israel is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh. Her first and postgraduate degrees in English Literature were completed at the University of Delhi, India, where she also taught English literary studies for several years before moving to the UK.

Hephzibah’s research explores the cultural history of South Asia through the lens of translation and language use in literary and religious contexts. She studies the encounters between writers and translators across religious traditions in colonial and contemporary South Asia.

She loves translating as much as she enjoys teaching and talking about translation and its effects. She has authored Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation and the Making of Protestant Identity (2011) and has edited the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion (2023). She has collaborated on several research projects, from conversion accounts written and translated in colonial South Asia to the presence (and futures?) of colonial monuments in European and colonial public spaces.

Read Hephzibah's staff profile

How to attend

This exhibition is free and open to all. No registration is required.

The Talbot Rice Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm.

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