Reflections on Curating Balinese Textiles

Lamak Textile, Bali, Indonesia, before 1943, Tropenmuseum, The Netherlands

In the final talk of the IOW Material Histories webinar series, Urmila Mohan reflects on the process of research that led to her 2018 exhibit on Balinese textiles as well as the catalog publication at the Bard Graduate Center. As an anthropologist, Dr. Mohan will consider the movement and relationship between ethnography at fieldsites in Indonesia and the archival work carried out in collections around the U.S. In doing so, she explores how issues of cultural and global responsibility and sensitivity can be incorporated or brought into dialog with forms of curating and collecting.
Date: April 22, 2021, Thursday, 12pm-1pm EST
Register here for this talk.

About the Speaker

Dr. Urmila Mohan is an anthropologist and curator of material culture and religion with a focus on textiles and Hinduism in India and Indonesia. She is Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. She is the founder and editor of the The Jugaad Project  and has published on materiality, praxis and aesthetics in the context of textiles, clothing and religion. She curated “Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles” in 2018, based on the Mead-Bateson textile collection at the American Museum of Natural History. Her research has been funded by Victoria and Albert Museum (Nehru Trust for Indian Collections), London; Asian Cultural Council, New York; Coby Foundation Ltd., New York, and Rotary International. A transdisciplinary scholar who works across domains and geographies, she draws upon her background in anthropology, design and art to develop and teach courses that connect these fields.

Book Review (PDF)

Click on the thumbnail on the left for a review of Dr. Mohan's book 
Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles, New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2018.

The Material Histories of the Indian Ocean World, 1500-Present webinar is generously supported by funding from Mason's College of Humanities and Social Science through the Interdisciplinary Programming Support Fund and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.
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