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Best of Material World Blog: Museums, Exhibitions, Archives, Memorials

By on July 15, 2014 in Book Reviews, Conference and Event Reports, Exhibition reviews, From the editors, Good Links

Since its inception, Material World has treated museums and archives not only as repositories of material culture, but as material culture–that is, material products as well as producers of culture and social memory. As institutions, they are sites of collection and exhibition, acts that have their own material and materializing dimensions.

Here are some of our favorite posts about museums, exhibitions, archives, and memorials:

Graeme Were reviews the Musée du Quai Branly a year after it opened.

Anna Weinrich examines two permanent museum exhibitions in Australia featuring Aboriginal culture and collections by a foundational anthropologist, testing out the new museology against the politics of Aboriginal voice.

Diana Young discusses her curatorial efforts to enliven museum collections in dialogue with Aboriginal artists.

Bethany Edmunds reviews two British exhibitions of Pacific material, reflecting on the role of language in framing both historic and contemporary art and material culture.…

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Circulation, Appropriation and Visual Consumption of Crafts in Chennai.

By on May 10, 2014 in Exhibition reviews, Objects and visual analyses

Circulation, Appropriation and Visual Consumption of Crafts in Chennai.

 Dr.Kala Shreen

Founder & Director,Cultural Dynamics & Emotions Network (CDEN), School of History and Anthropology,Queen’s University Belfast, U.K. www.qub.ac.uk/cden
Chairperson,Center for Creativity, Heritage and Development, Chennai, INDIA, www.cchd.in

 In 2012, a world crafts summit was convened by World Crafts Council in the metropolitan city of Chennai, South India.  World Crafts Council is a non-profit organization, affiliated to UNESCO, that works “to strengthen the status of crafts as a vital part of cultural and economic life” as recounted in their web portal.  In a press meet during the summit, the President of the World Crafts Council said, “One of the objectives of this summit is to reinforce the importance of crafts in our society and culture…  Why should crafts take a back seat to other forms of art such as paintings, sculptures, music, dance and films?  Crafts are also works of art in their own way…Therefore, I also feel that craftspeople should be given the same kind of respect and social status that fine artists are given.”

This summit, among other events and activities, comprised craft expositions organized at various renowned art galleries in the Chennai city.  The organizing team of the summit said that they wanted to create an interface between art and craft and had labelled this initiative as the “interdisciplinary art-craft exhibitions series”.  A range of crafts including textiles, puppets, baskets, furniture and home accessories moved into the art space in local art galleries that predominantly hosted art exhibitions comprising sculptures and paintings in the past.  The ensuing circulation and consumption of crafts shall be the focus of my following discussion with specific reference to two examples.…

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Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935

By on March 25, 2013 in Announcements and Listings
Naga basketry helmet with crest of hair from Upper Chindwin,Burma. Collected by the Vernay-Hopwood Chindwin Expedition in 1935. American Museum of Natural History 70.0/6374.

Naga basketry helmet with crest of hair from Upper Chindwin,Burma. Collected by the Vernay-Hopwood Chindwin Expedition in 1935. American Museum of Natural History 70.0/6374.

 

Bard Graduate Center Presents

Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935
April 4 to August 3, 2013

This remarkable exhibition features an assortment of rarely viewed objects carried on the expedition and collected in the field, including clothing, saddles, weapons, photographs, and film footage.

In January 1935, the Vernay-Hopwood Chindwin Expedition set out from Rangoon to explore the upper reaches of the “mighty Chindwin River” on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History. The three-month expedition gathered the museum’s founding biological and anthropological collections from an under-researched area to the east of Burma’s border with Assam and to the south of Tibet.…

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Hair Today

By on November 13, 2012 in Exhibition reviews

Haidy Geismar, UCL

This is a short commentary on the current special exhibition at the Musee du Quai Branly, Paris’ “Museum of the others”. The exhibition, Cheveux Cheris: Frivolites et Trophies, translated into English as The Art of Hair is curated by Yves LeFur, Director of the Museum’s Heritage and Collections Department and draws on the museum’s extensive collections of objects made from (mainly) human hair and images of people and their hair. The argument is that hair is universally a powerful cultural and aesthetic medium. The result is a series of disconnected objects and images that contain an underarticulated narrative of gender, oppression, violence and power.

The exhibition, on the second floor of the museum, high above the controversial galleries, is first glimpsed through a tantalizing art installation that can be seen from below.…

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Ghosts, Giants and fairies: Classic Faked Photographs a slide show

By on August 29, 2012 in Announcements and Listings, Art, Literature and Poetry, Exhibition reviews

Does the camera ever lie? A new exhibition shows that photography has been doing exactly that since its inception. From fairies at the bottom of the garden to ghostly visitors, here is a slide show of the best manipulated images (from the BBC Website).

• Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 11 October

Ghost photo: ghost photo 2 from the Met exhibition

 …

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