Sacred Landscapes Talk

Come listen as New School faculty members and ICI staff share their insights from fieldwork in India, Nepal and Tibet as part of a three-year Sacred Himalaya Initiative focused on religion, ecology and culture in the Himalayas. Faculty involved with ICI’s research project–Rafi Youatt (NSSR), Mark Larrimore (Lang), Nitin Sawhney (Media Studies) and Sreshta Rit Premnath (Parsons)–will talk about their experiences traveling in these sacred landscapes and how this work has influenced their own artistic and academic practices as well as their teaching. A photo presentation highlighting some of the key areas from the field research will be featured.

5:00-6:00 pm – Gallery Tour and Reception
6:00-7:00 pm – Faculty Talk and Presentation

The opening reception and gallery tour will take place in the Aronson Gallery, 66 Fifth Ave. The talk will take place next door in the Kellen Auditorium.

Drinks and refreshments will be served. The event is free and will be Live streamed on the official New School channel. Watch it there.

This event is the final event for the Kailash Cartographies exhibition. Learn more about the month-long exhibit here.

A press release about the exhibit can be found here.

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About the Exhibit

Kailash Cartographies is an exhibition of artists from India, China, Nepal, and the US exploring conceptions of sacred geography, particularly in the Himalayas.  Devotees encounter the sacred through ritual, art, and acts of pilgrimage and circumambulation of mountains and temples.  The artists in the exhibition pose questions about the nature of both the sacred and the secular by drawing on the points of connection with landscapes and lived worlds. The photographs, videos, works on paper and installations, deploy cartographic modes that are both personal and political.

The title of the exhibition refers to Mount Kailash, the symbolic center of the Buddhist and Bön cosmos and the seat of Shiva for Hindus. Although associated with a multiplicity of geographical sites and religious representations, its earthly manifestation is most often located in Tibet. “It is the simultaneously singular and plural aspect of this sacred geography that caught our imagination,” said Sreshta Rit Premnath, curator of the exhibition and participating artist. “Every gesture within such a geography is both specifically located yet can be powerfully invoked elsewhere.”

The exhibition emerges from a three-year research project of The New School’s India China Institute focused on Sacred Landscapes and Sustainable Futures in the Himalayas.  In conjunction with this endeavor, a group of artists initiated creative explorations during 2015-2016.  Many of the works in this exhibition were the direct result of a creative workshop convened in Kathmandu in March 2016. The exhibit is part of ICI’s ongoing Sacred Himalaya Initiative research project focused on Mount Kailash in Tibet.

Featured artists are Atul Bhalla, Kevin Bubriski, Vibha Galhotra, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Ashmina Ranjit, Nitin Sawhney, Radhika Subramaniam, Charwei Tsai & Tsering Tashi Gyalthang, Zheng Bo & Jiang Chao and Qiu Zhijie.

Presented by the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and the India China Institute.