Announcing the opening of three new exhibitions for the UCL Ethnography Collections

Students and Staff working with the UCL Ethnography Collections have developed three exhibitions, all of which open next week. We invite you to join us at UCL’s Octagon Gallery at 8.30 pm on June 17th,  for a special introduction to the third exhibition, with drinks in the Old Refectory afterwards.

The first exhibition, curated by Phd Student Liz Fox and Undergraduate Priya Joshi, ties in with the conference, The Bodily and Material Cultures of Religious Subjectivation and will be on display in the Anthropology department lobby for the next month. The exhibition draws together objects that make us consider the the embodied and corporeal nature of religious experience and explores the material production of religious subjects.

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The second exhibition, Decoding Fibres, is curated by a Masters Students working in Material, Visual and Digital Culture. The exhibition comprises photographs of woven artifacts in the ethnography collection and asks about the shared materiality of weaving as it migrates across different media. This will be on display in a small vintage display case, opposite Jeremy Bentham‘s Auto Icon in the UCL Cloisters.

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The Third Exhibition, Te Ara Wairua, is a collaborative research project between artists, technologists and communities in New Zealand and the UCL Ethnography Collections. The project explores the capacities of digital technologies to enhance collections and extend their reach and influence. Working with an un-provenanced Maori cloak (Kakahu) woven of flax with hair tassels, a digital environment will be constructed to welcome the cloak ‘into the light’ by representatives of the cloak’ s original homeland. A real-time cellular connection will translate voices and environmental sounds through sound-carrying light. This will be on Display in the Octagon Gallery from June 17-19 and afterwards in the North Lodge of the main quad of UCL.

 

Thanks to all staff and students for their hard work and especially to Delphine Mercier, our collections manager, Susie Pancaldo (UCL Museums and Collections Conservator) and Susie Chan and Dave Bellamy (UCL Museums and Collections Exhibitions team). Thanks also to the Anthropology Department for their support through their RRG Fund.