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Wednesday 23 January 2013

Yoga: The Art of Transformation

Hatha Yogic Pranayam depicted in a wall painting, dating back to the early 18th century


Yoga: The Art of Transformation, at The Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC will be the world's first exhibition about the discipline's visual history. I wish i could go and see it!

... (the exhibition) explores how its meanings changed over time as yoga became a global phenomenon. Eighty masterpieces of sculpture and painting, dating from the 3rd century to the 18th century, illuminate yoga's central tenets as well as its obscured histories. Some 40 colonial and early modern photographs, books, and films reveal how yoga was despised as superstition during the 19th century and then resurrected in early 20th-century India as a democratic practice open to all. Borrowed from 25 museums and private collections in India, Europe, and the United States, its highlights include an installation that reunites for the first time three monumental stone yogini goddesses from a 10th-century Chola temple; 10 folios from the first illustrated compilation of asanas (yogic postures), which was made for a Mughal emperor in 1602 and has never been exhibited in the United States; and a Thomas Edison film, Hindoo Fakir (1906), the first movie ever produced about India...

The exhibition will be on from October 19, 2013 - January 26, 2014.

Trikala Bhairava, 11th – 12th century; Cleveland Museum of Art.
 Found via yogadork

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