Jan 18 2023 to Jan 18 2023 4:30 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Museum of Art & Photography (MAP)

Kasturba Road, Bengaluru 560001

Event Description

For centuries, philosophers in India wrote that paintings should be looked at with insight. The effect they can have on us far surpasses a single sensory experience – it conveys sound and feeling, gives us goosebumps, makes us fall in love, and enchants us into leaving ourselves behind. The painted depictions of yoginis are historically associated with this effect. The portrayals of these women in tantra are charged with energy and trace powerful female divinities.

Join Prof. Molly Aitken in an exploration of the power that paintings of yoginis once had to bless or bedevil those who looked at them and to lure them into dangerous places of the mind and heart.

This event is in collaboration with the Deccan Heritage Foundation.

Speaker Profile

About Molly Aitken

Associate Professor, The City College of New York (CUNY)

Molly Emma Aitken writes about image ontologies, hermeneutics, materiality, and relationships among painting, music, dance, dress, sociability and self-fashioning within the ambit of South Asia’s royal courts. Her book The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) broke new ground with its commitment to the meaningful interplay of court painting styles. The book won CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey award in 2011 and the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012. Aitken is currently working on two manuscripts. We Are All Women is about artful expressions of loving and gendering in elite Mughal society. The second, In the Sisterhood of Images, a personal exploration, turns on the pressure a life exerts on scholarship. Aitken is an Associate Professor of early modern to modern South Asian visual arts at The Graduate Center and The City College of New York (CUNY).