'Palimpsest of Memory' - exhibition

The Faculty of Fine Arts invites you to a solo exhibition by Szymon Pruciak, an interdisciplinary artist and lecturer at the American University of Cyprus. The opening of ‘Palimpsest of Memory’ will take place on 11 December at 12:00 noon at Gallery 9.39 (Szosa Bydgoska 50/56).

In 1878, British photographer John Thomson captured Cyprus through a colonial lens, giving the island a picturesque and ‘semi-oriental’ character. The ‘Palimpsest of Memory’ project revisits these photographs, using artificial intelligence to explore how machines inherit and reproduce this way of seeing. Generative artificial intelligence recreates Thomson's scenes from within, imagining perspectives that correspond to the imperial camera. The resulting images are realised using historical 19th-century photographic methods, combining digital speculation with the earliest chemistry of photography.

The project draws on Walter Benjamin's reflections on mechanical reproduction and analyses them for the algorithmic age, in which images are created from data rather than light. In dialogue with Edward Said, Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the work treats vision as a shared, entangled act of man and machine. It encourages viewers to re-examine how technologies of vision shape history — and to imagine a future in which the very act of looking becomes an ethical practice.

The exhibition will be open until the end of January 2026.

Szymon Pruciak is a visual artist and lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the American University of Cyprus. He works with photography, film and video, using both historical photographic techniques and new media. His works have been presented at dozens of group and solo exhibitions in Europe, the Americas and Asia. Some of his works are also part of the French National Collection.