All tagged art history

Timur Merah Project: A Pilgrimage of Narrative, Memory, and Historical Legacy

Timur Merah Project: A Pilgrimage of Narrative, Memory, and Historical Legacy

Citra Sasmita

Balinese artist Citra Sasmita writes about her ongoing project “Timur Merah” and its interest in probing the important role of women in the Indonesian literary and artistic canon. She maps stereotypical depictions of women in canonic texts, and in a counter reading of women as leaders and resistors, emphasises heroes such as I Dewa Istri Kanya, Queen of the 19th c. Klungkung kingdom. In the second half of the essay, Sasmita tracks the effects of the indigenous male gaze on women, art and the island of Bali, as it transforms into the Dutch colonial gaze, determining what is “authenticity” and privileging what/who should be deemed valuable in shaping Balinese artistic heritage.

The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesque

The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesque

Jessica Hughes and Urmila Mohan
Curatorial Essays

A curatorial essay accompanying the digital exhibit “The Color of Memory – Claire Le Pape’s Giottoesques” on a body of work by the French artist Claire Le pape, inspired by the frescos of the Italian painter Giotto. This essay places us on a voyage of discovery, to see color as a passionate muse for artists across widely differing centuries, worlds and materials. Through Le Pape’s video testimonials and intricate tapestries woven out of fishing twine we see how color and religion overlap to create spaces of immersive and transcendental experience. Le Pape’s series of weavings called ‘Giottoesques’ showcase the ability of colorful materials to sensorially evoke the numinous as well as reference the artist’s own religiosity or spirituality.

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

Aimee Hinds
Articles, Peer Reviewed

The polychromy of classical sculpture has been systematically suppressed in Western art since the Renaissance resulting in an artificial whiteness that fits within a tradition of presenting false racial narratives of the Greco-Roman historical past and mythology, one that codes all idealised bodies as white, young, and hetero-normative. Using an intersectional framework to consider the significance of class, gender and race, the author analyses receptions of the Farnese Hercules and explores why (lack of) colour has been weaponised as a way for Western culture to claim an inheritance from the ancient Greco-Roman world, and how this is perpetuated in modern classical reception.

Aura and Inversion in a Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and her Statues

Aura and Inversion in a Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and her Statues

David Morgan
Articles

The author analyses Marian devotion as an ‘economy of the sacred’, mediated by the statue of Our Lady of Fatima. Through data gathered in churches in the U.S., Morgan shows how a divine economy relies on material devices and embodied practices to satisfy a specific Christian theology, helps devotees render penance and devotion to the Virgin, and ensures her grace in return.

Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

Jessica Hughes
Articles

An essay on the details and aesthetic significance of a votive offering that artist Yves Klein made to St. Rita of Cascia. While art has always played an ineliminable role in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it seems that Klein was particularly sensitive to the entanglement of votive offering, economic sacrifice, and the experiential dimensions of ritual. In many of Klein's works, it would seem that the subsumption of art into religion has been inverted.