The exhibition focuses on several forms of performed folk art that capture the intersection of ritual, performance and art in the living traditions of India. Performance art traditions from several regions of India will be featured including Bengali storytelling scrolls (pata), women’s ritual paintings from the Mithila region of India, Andhra shadow puppets, large epic storytelling scrolls (par) and storytelling boxes from Rajasthan. Reflecting traditions thousands of years old as well as modern events, these art forms remind their audiences of the stories of the gods and goddesses with whom their human devotees share the world. The exhibition also examines the social and artistic changes taking place within these traditions in the 20th and 21st centuries.
"The predominant theme is that these are folk arts that are performed," says Susan Wadley, the Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies in the Maxwell School. Largely anonymous folk artists create objects to be used by their patrons in annual rituals/festivals, while others are made to celebrate a wedding or birth. Wadley continues, "That a Bengali pata now deals with the atom bomb speaks to the intersection of the worlds of India and the United States, and to the importance of linking these voices through the exhibition."
For more information on the exhibition, please visit www.maxwell.syr.edu/southasiacenter/BanyanTree/PressRoom.htm.
For more information on the the Mithila paintings, please visit www.mithilapaintings.org.
Sponsored by:
The Program in Asian Studies and co-sponsored by the Institute for Comparative and International Studies, Department of Religion, Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, Institute of Liberal Arts, Visual Arts Program, Center for Public Scholarship, Graduate Division of Religion and the Hightower Fun |
