Tuesday, May 1, 2018
12:30 PM – 1:45 PM
The Elliott School of International Affairs
Room 505
1957 E St., NW Washington, DC 20052
This event is co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the
Corcoran School of the Arts & Design
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| Guung Kawi, Bali (photo: Emma Natalya Stein) |
Art in Indonesia is not typically found in a museum. Throughout the archipelago, pre-modern shrines are cut into rock faces, built on the banks of thunderous, rushing rivers, or carefully aligned with volcanic mountains. Sacred structures are positioned as organic parts of the tropical environment. Immersive and multisensory, they reveal a seamless connection between art and place. While the larger monuments suggest patronage by elites, constellations of minor shrines likely functioned as hermitages and places of worship for ascetics and local communities. Mapping these monuments reveals a dense network of sacred sites built up along rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water.
Beginning from riverside shrines in the jungles of Indonesia, this paper considers the close relationship between sacred art and landscape. It further explores strategies for reinvesting objects in museum collections with a sense of their intended contexts. Individual objects reveal aspects of the environments in which they were produced. In turn, even a basic understanding of Asian landscapes can transform a visitor’s encounter with an object that at first may be wholly unfamiliar. Within the galleries, an engagement with environmental factors, such as geology and climate, can invigorate museum collections and help them continue to grow creatively and in ways not limited to acquisitions.
This event is on the record and open to the media.
About the Speaker:
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| Emma Stein at Belahan, a tenth-century site in East Java, Indonesia. | |
Emma Natalya Stein is Curatorial Fellow for Southeast Asian Art at the Freer|Sackler, the Smithsonian’s museums of Asian Art, in Washington, DC. She is a specialist of sculpture and sacred architecture of South and Southeast Asia, with a primary interest in the ways in which art and landscape intersect. Emma completed her PhD in the History of Art at Yale in 2017, and she has conducted fieldwork in Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. She has worked on exhibitions and publications at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Rubin Museum, and the Freer|Sackler, and she has lectured and taught at institutions in India, Indonesia, and the USA. Today she will discuss bringing context to collections, with a paper entitled, “Jungle Art: Southeast Asia at the Smithsonian’s Freer|Sackler Galleries.”
Holly Shaffer is Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture at Brown University; she specializes in the 18th-19th century arts of South Asia and Britain. Her current book project reinterprets the eclectic arts produced in the western Indian city of Pune in the 18th century and their dissemination in print in the 19th century. Other projects include studies of ephemeral arts, such as light, cuisine, and architectural models in the northern Indian region of Awadh; and of European printed representations of India that went viral. She has published articles on these subjects in Journal 18, Third Text, Art India; and forthcoming in The Art Bulletin; and has curated exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art; the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution; and Dartmouth College.
Maeve Nolan is a second year PhD Art History and Archeology student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is currently a visiting scholar with George Washington University’s Sigur Center whilst she conducts her research at the National Geographic Society. The title of her PhD is:
Dr. Janet Steele is an associate professor of journalism at the George Washington University and the director of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University and focus on how culture is communicated through the mass media.
Dr. Jonathan Stalling is Professor of English specializing in East-West Poetics at the University of Oklahoma, where he is a founding editor of Chinese Literature Today magazine and book series and the Curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive at the University of Oklahoma Library. He is also the Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of China’s Literature Abroad at Beijing Normal University and was the 2015 Poet in Residence at Beijing University. Dr. Stalling is the author of six books of literary scholarship, translation and poetry and his opera 吟歌 丽诗 was staged at Yunnan University in 2010.
Dr. Mikhail Pelevin is Professor of Iranian Philology at St. Petersburg State University (Russian Federation). His main area of research is the early modern Pashto literature conceptualized as the most distinct and expressive element of social culture and ethnic self-identification of Pashtuns in the transition period from the late Middle Ages to modern times. Among his publications in Russian are books Khushhal Khan Khatak (1613-1689): the Beginning of the Afghan National Poetry (2001), Afghan Poetry in the First Half and the Middle of the Seventeenth century (2005), Afghan Literature of the Late Middle Ages (2010); a new book The Khattaks’ Chronicle: the Corpus and Functions of the Text is coming soon. Few recent articles are available in English, e.g.: “The Beginnings of Pashto Narrative Prose” (2017), “Persian Letters of a Pashtun Tribal Ruler on Judicial Settlement of a Political Conflict”, 1724 (2017), Daily Arithmetic of Pashtun Tribal Rulers: Numbers in The Khataks’ Chronicle (2016), “Ethnic consciousness of Pashtun Tribal Rulers in Pre-modern Times” (2015). M. Pelevin teaches courses on Persian, Pashto, the history of Persian and Pashto literatures. His other academic interests include Iranian dialectology and Muslim law.
