Tag: History
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Coir in Pepper House
In the courtyard of Pepper House, one of the venues of the 2016 Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Indian artist Praneet Soi had put up a number of sculptures made of coir on wooden supports. Soi had chosen to work with coir especially for the Biennale since this material has been and still is so important for the…
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Fort Kochi
And when you have got enough for a moment of the art in Aspinwall, you open the windows and doors and look outside. Aspinwall is the name of the old 19th century trading company whose compound with deserted office buildings and warehouses in Fort Kochi is the main venue of the Kochi-Muziris Art Biennale. With…
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Death of an anthropologist
I haven’t found an explanation by the Aboriginal painter July Dowling about this work of hers. Whatever I say about it will be guesswork. But it is interesting, and probably not without significance, to note that apart from red ochre and synthetic paint, blood has been used in the painting. The three Aboriginal women’s faces in…
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Feminine beauty
5 Pillars, 5 times Hathor, the goddess of beauty, joy and love. We are here in the temple complex on the little island of Philae in the Nile south of Aswan. The temple dates back to the Ptolemaic dynasty. 3000 Years of pharaonic rule is coming to an end, and, as we can see, Egyptian art…
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The Bent Pyramid of Dashur
“We humbly greet you, oh majestic pyramid of Snofru.” That’s what the tracks in the sand seem to express in honour of the monumental tomb. The pyramids of Giza and Dashur are awe-inspiring indeed. Not only man, but the entire environment comes under the spell of their mighty presence. A drifting cloud grows dark in response to…
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The Pyramids
Going down the pyramids, one doesn’t do it every day. Nor coming face to face with them. When the moment is there, one can’t avoid the impression of absolute grandeur, and of well-nigh disbelief that thousands of years ago people have managed to plan, organize and build monuments like that. With its height of 140…
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Lakhudiyar
Already in prehistory humans must have been enchanted by the natural beauty of the Kumaon hills. They have left their traces, as we can see for example in the rock shelter the board on the photo speaks so nicely about. Lakhudiyar can be found between present day Almora and Jageshwar. It looks as if the…
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Through the fjord with a bang
While the Maori section of the museum in Okains Bay offered an interesting picture of Maori traditional craft and culture, the colonial section looked a bit like a junk shop, a ‘brocante’, with a nostalgic making mishmash of early 20th century objects brought along by the white settlers. The painted drum in the picture, with…
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Coffee time!
The background of the impressive Maori figure on the painting we recognize as Okains Bay, the pristine bay that I showed you on this blog two weeks ago. Behind the Maori’s back we see two waka (traditional Maori canoes) pulled up on the beach. The first Maoris that came to New Zealand over a thousand…
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Okains Bay
Okains Bay is not just a magnificent bay on New Zealand’s South Island (see last week’s post). It is also the place of an old Maori settlement with still a considerable percentage of Maori population to this date. The photo shows the inside of the Whaakata, a traditional meeting house, now part of the Maori…
καιρός remembered 