art&culture

october 31, 2017 - Masi Lugano

On the paths of illumination - The myth of India in Western Culture 1808-2017

On the paths of illumination
The myth of India in Western Culture 1808-2017
24 September 2017 - 21 January 2018 LAC #lugano Arte e Cultura
Curated by Elio Schenini
The exhibition is under the Patronage of the Indian Embassy in Switzerland
Press release
#lugano, Friday, 22 September 2017
Forming part of the Focus India project, from September 24 2017 until January 21 2018 the Museum of Art of Italian Switzerland (MASI) is housing an extensive exhibition dedicated to India and to its influence on Western culture and art in its various forms. "On the paths of illumination. The myth of India in Western Culture 1808-2017" offers an expansive and diversified 'look' at the way in which Indian reality from the nineteenth century up until today - with its traditions, religions, landscapes, cultures and artistic forms - has increasingly more both fascinated and influenced the western artistic and cultural world. Curated by Elio Schenini, the exhibition has the patronage of the Indian Embassy in Switzerland.
By way of 400 works and a multitude of diverse material, the exhibition installation on the two floors of the Museum presents the central theme of this exhibition, clearly evidencing the profound influence that India has had on western art and culture over the last two centuries: ranging from Schopenhauer's reflections on Hinduism and Buddhism which would later also inspire the literature of Hermann Hesse, becoming a point of reference for entire generations with Siddhartha, to the anthropological analyses by Carl Gustav Jung, the popular novels by Kipling and Emilio Salgari and the cinema by Rossellini and Pasolini. Without forgetting the Beatles who contributed towards making India fashionable among western adolescents as is testified to by the combination of music, oriental spirituality and psychedelic experimentation of the juvenile counterculture between the 1960s and the 1970s. Not to mention the "Indian" photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Werner Bischof, the imagined city in Chandigarh by Le Corbusier and the numerous artists who during the last decades drew inspiration and influences from the Indian subcontinent such as Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Richard Long, Luigi Ontani, Francesco Clemente and Anselm Kiefer, to mention only a few. An exhibition itinerary which is both rich and extremely variegated through which we clearly see how India and its millennia-old traditions have seduced a multitude of intellectuals and exponents of European culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The exhibition therefore proposes to tell us how this great country has become that mythical 'elsewhere' the West has looked to - above all starting from the 1960s - as an alternative to a context increasingly more rigidly subjected to the logic of production and consumerism. What remains of this myth today, faced by an increasingly more globalized reality, is the question by way of which the last section of the exhibition projects us into the actuality of today's scenario, trying to offer us a glimpse of India with the shots of outstanding contemporary photographers like Sabastião Salgado, Ferdinando Scianna, Michael Ackerman, Steve McCurry and Martin Parr.
The exhibition is accompanied by a volume of 672 pages published by Skira which traces the history of this "Indian fascination" on the part of the West with an extremely rich iconographic documentation and a large number of contributions by various authors who deal with the manifold spheres of this fascination: ranging from art to literature, music, religion, the history of customs and psychology. The result is a singular course through the last two centuries of the history of Western culture in which, from among the many others, we can meet Schopenhauer, Kipling, Salgari, Redon, Gustave Moreau, Mata Hari, Kirchner, Hesse, Jung, Cartier-Bresson, Le Corbusier, Ginsberg, Pasolini, Sottsass, the Beatles, Rauschenberg, Francesco Clemente and Luigi Ontani.
70 Years of Swiss-Indian Friendship
This exhibition forms part of the biennial initiative "70 Years of Swiss-Indian Friendship: Connecting Minds - Inspiring the Future (SIF70)". This is a series of events organized by the Swiss Embassy in India to celebrate the 70 years of Indo-Swiss friendship, formalized by the treatise signed by the two countries in New Delhi on the 14th of August 1948.
Focus India
This exhibition forms part of the Focus India project, an extensive and innovatory programme ideated in order to include in an interdisciplinary way the visual arts, as presented above, together with music, dance and cinema as well as the numerous other facets of Indian culture such as medicine, Indian cuisine and meditation. There will be a large number of encounters and appointments throughout the Autumn: these will range from the big names of music and dance (the sitarist Nishat Kahn and the dancers Shantala Shivalingappa and Aakash Odedra) to a comprehensive programme of events and activities including workshops treating Indian narrative dance, laboratories for children, conferences regarding ayurveda, public meetings, yoga sessions, readings, master classes with the artists present and an exposition of cinema organized by Marco Mueller. An important and ambitious project which besides showing the many influences of Indian culture will also be an occasion to reveal the multidisciplinary nature of the Cultural Centre of #lugano.
The complete programme of events from September can be found on the website www.india.luganolac.ch.

- Photogallery (14)

01 Ignoto, Shiva Nataraja Inizio XX secolo

1796x2400, 2MB

02 V Verescagin Taj Mahal Mausolem, Agra, 1876

2500x1973, 2MB

03 E Lord Weeks The Last Voyage, 1885

2500x1673, 2MB

04 Odilon Redon, La mort de Bouddha 1899 ca

940x1193, 3MB

05 Mata Hari danza nella biblioteca del Musee Guimet, 1905

2500x1768, 1MB

06 C G Jung Da Rote Buch - pagina 105, 1919-1920

1894x2500, 1MB

07 L Hohlwein Die kostliche Speise Schokolade Riquetta, 1925

2036x3200, 5MB

08 W Bosshard Gandhi legge le corrispondenze di guerra, 1930

3084x4091, 2MB

09 Ginsberg sul tetto della casa del brahmano, Benares, 1963

2500x1905, 2MB

10 F Clemente Autoritratto, 2005

1743x2500, 360KB

11 L Ontani Krishna, 1978 Collezione Fabio-Sargentini

2326x1658, 2MB

12 S Salgado Coal Miningm, 1989 ∏Salgado Amazonas images

2500x1670, 2MB

13 F Scianna Benares, 1997 ∏ Ferdinando Scianna-Magnum Photos

1665x2500, 3MB

14 M Cattelan Mother-Fakir, 199

1413x1772, 1MB

- Documents (4)

Press release

259KB

Didascalie

487KB

Credit Suisse Factsheet 31102017-031 (1)

748KB

Scheda catalogo 31102017-031

155KB

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