The Cursed Land of Lustful Women is a devised performance created as part of an art residency. The stories (in the form of a devised text) told in the performance are being published in this book with an artist's note.
These are tales of trees, forests and their deities from the artist's point of view. One rarely comes across voices of forest communities and women in ancient literary sources, though enchanting forests and rivers are described in the most enigmatic way. One often comes across the splendour of trees as an overwhelming theme. So much of this beauty we have exchanged today for an artificial idea of luxury. This performance attempts at bringing out this forgotten magic.
Drawing on ancient Indian history and mythology, the Cursed Land of Lustful Women is a unique artistic vision that brings to life the timeless link between humanity and nature through performance, poetry, storytelling, and commentary. Using the age-old Indian motif of the female and the tree, scenes from the Jataka tales, and poems from the ancient book Gathasaptasati, Gupta passionately shows how we can confront our environmentally challenged future by reconnecting with the wisdom of the past. (The performance is available in open access on the Slovene Ethnographic Museum's YouTube channel under the same title.)
Kanika Gupta is an art historian, trained dancer, and filmmaker who holds a master's degree in Art History from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, and a Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She is a faculty member at the National Institute of Design (Ahmedabad and Kurukshetra), where she teaches various subjects, including Art History and Comparative Aesthetics. She has also created online postgraduate course content on the History of Indian Sculpture for the Indian government's ePathshala initiative and has published numerous research papers on ancient Indian sculpture, aesthetics, painting, and mythology. She is the co-author of the book "Lupadakhe: Unknown Master Sculptors of Ancient India." With her recent collaboration with the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, she extensively worked on their Indian collection.
This performance text is a result of years of pondering over history, the stories embedded in history, issues of identity and my own self. Its process consists of a lot of internal work and even more external work which was laborious and took more years than expected.
The Slovene Ethnographic Museum (SEM) has been actively engaged in European projects for many years, providing opportunities to situate our experiences and practices consistently within the European museum context. By doing this, we draw attention to our unique characteristics and develop our contents and methodological actions in line with them. Especially in dealing with non-European collections, SEM participates in current discussions in this area which, among other things, direct museums to share its authority and care for heritage with the communities of origin, as well as to the repatriation of museum objects. Our consideration of how to interpret non-European collections from the European periphery has been encouraged by the project Taking Care: Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Spaces of Care (2019-2023), which links thirteen European museums with these collections.
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