Month: March 2015

Coming Exhibition: China Through the Looking Glass

“China Through the Looking Glass”

Who: Met Museum

When: May. 7, 2015 – Aug. 16, 2015 (View Hours Here)

Where:

Chinese Galleries / Anna Wintour Costume Center
Metropolitan Museum
1000 Fifth Ave.
at 82nd Street
New York, NY 10028

How Much: (View Pricing Here)

More Information: Here

“This exhibition, organized by The Costume Institute in collaboration with the Department of Asian Art, will explore how China has fueled the fashionable imagination for centuries, resulting in highly creative distortions of cultural realities and mythologies. High fashion will be juxtaposed with Chinese costumes, paintings, porcelains, and other art, as well as films, to reveal enchanting reflections of Chinese imagery.

From the earliest period of European contact with China in the sixteenth century, the West has been enchanted with enigmatic objects and imagery from the East, providing inspiration for fashion designers from Paul Poiret to Yves Saint Laurent, whose fashions are infused at every turn with romance, nostalgia, and make-believe. Through the looking glass of fashion, designers conjoin disparate stylistic references into a pastiche of Chinese aesthetic and cultural traditions.

The exhibition will feature more than one hundred examples of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear alongside Chinese art. Filmic representations of China will be incorporated throughout to reveal how our visions of China are framed by narratives that draw upon popular culture, and also to recognize the importance of cinema as a medium through which to understand the richness of Chinese history.

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The man who returned his grandfather’s looted art

“The man who returned his grandfather’s looted art”

by Ellen Otzen via “BBC News“

At the end of the 19th Century British troops looted thousands of works of art from the Benin Empire – in modern-day Nigeria – and brought them home. One soldier’s grandson inherited two bronzes but recently returned them to their original home.

“It’s an image that’s deeply ingrained in my memory. The dead body seemed unreal. It’s not a picture you can easily forget,” says Mark Walker.

He was 12 years old when he first saw his grandfather’s diary – the photographs inside made a deep impression.

“They were very faded, but perhaps the most shocking one for me was a partly dried-up body being held up by two men on a pole.

“Clearly the people lifting the body didn’t actually want to touch it and that seemed to me to capture the feeling my grandfather also had about them. It was something so horrible you wanted to keep it at arm’s length,” says Mark.

The pictures were taken by his grandfather, Capt Herbert Walker, in West Africa in 1897.

The two Walkers never met – Herbert died in 1932, 15 years before his grandson was born and Mark’s grandmother showed him the journal, titled To Benin and back, while he was staying with her in 1959.

The Benin Kingdom, which is now part of Nigeria, had a wealth of natural resources including ivory, palm oil and rubber which the UK was keen to control.

Mark Walker spoke to Witness on BBC World Service Radio

But in January 1897, seven British officials who were on their way to see the Oba of Benin – the king – were killed in an ambush.

The Times of London reported that the men “on quite a peaceful mission” had been “massacred by the King’s people”.

Map of Nigeria showing location of Benin City

It is unclear who, if anyone, ordered the killings and there are indications that the mission was not as peaceful as the British press described it. Although its leader, acting Consul-General James Phillips had sent a message to the Oba asking to discuss trade and peace, he had told London he wanted to depose him.

Art and law come together at weekend conference

“Art and law come together at weekend conference”

by Michelle Liu via “Yale Daily News”

An upcoming conference will show that artists do more with the law than get in trouble with it.

This weekend, over 350 people from all over the world will attend “The Legal Medium,” a multidisciplinary conference taking place this Thursday through Saturday at the Yale Law School. Organized by a group of 14 graduate and undergraduate students, the event aims to explore the relationship between art and the law, focusing on topics such as how artists manipulate legal boundaries in their work. Amar Bakshi LAW ’15, the main organizer of the conference, said the upcoming event is unique in that it approaches the art-law connection from an artistic rather than a legal perspective.

“Most conferences on law and art tend to be about how lawyers deal with issues such as repatriation of works, cultural property in different domains or even the economics [of art] and its linkages to different legal systems,” Bakshi said.

Alexandra Perloff-Giles LAW ’17, a co-organizer of the conference, also highlighted the uncommonly interdisciplinary nature of the conference, noting that it draws together a large variety of professionals from different disciplines, such as architects, curators, lawyers and poets. She added that such collaborative ventures between multiple graduate schools at Yale — including the YLS and the Yale School of Art — are also rare.

The conference will feature a presentation by performance artist Tehching Hsieh, who is renowned for acts such as relegating himself to solitary confinement for a year. His piece will both comment on legal regimes and interact with them, according to Bakshi.

Four discussion panels will also be held during the conference, exploring how artists interact with laws of the human body, artificial and natural environments, the digital world and the government.

Perloff-Giles emphasized that encounters between art and law in the modern world occur in many different ways. She cited the detainment of artist Tania Bruguera, originally a speaker for the conference, in December 2014 by the Cuban government after Bruguera attempted to stage an open mic event in Havana, Cuba.

In conjunction with the conference itself, Lucy Hunter GRD ’19 is curating an exhibition entitled “Irregular Rendition” at the Fred Giampietro Gallery on Chapel Street. Hunter said the exhibition seeks to expand the ways in which laws — ranging from laws of jurisprudence to laws of physics — are viewed from an artistic perspective.

Art I Love: Going Home

“Going Home” by HRFleur

ISIS Starts to Dismantle Iraqi Archaeological Site of Hatra: Officials

“ISIS Starts to Dismantle Iraqi Archaeological Site of Hatra: Officials”

by Elisha Fieldstadt via “NBC NEWS”

ISIS militants have begun dismantling the ancient archaeological site of Hatra in northern Iraq in their ongoing effort to eliminate the region of what they consider idolatrous imagery, Iraqi authorities said Saturday.

The militants have destroyed parts of Hatra, about 70 miles south of Mosul, and started to pilfer antiques from the city, Qais Hussein Rashid, deputy minister of tourism and antiquities, told NBC News. He called the attack “a new crime against the Iraqi civilization and humanity in general.”

The ancient city was classified as a World Heritage Site by The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1985. Hatra, largely built in the 2nd century B.C., was the capital of the first Arab Kingdom and survived invasions by the Romans in 116 and 198 A.D. because of its thick walls surrounded by towers, according to UNESCO.

ISIS has embarked on a campaign to destroy relics and historical sites that they apparently view as heretical. Last week, the group released a video that showed militants purportedly using sledgehammers to smash ancient artifacts in northern Iraq. On Thursday, the Iraqi government said the group had “bulldozed” the city of Nimrud, a 13th century B.C. Assyrian archaeological site just south of Mosul. UNESCO called the destruction of the city a war crime.

“The world and international organizations should stand against such a brutal assault on the human heritage,” Iraq’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement. “Otherwise,” the ministry added, “these gangs will commit more crimes and violations against the civilization.”