Transcendent Deities Conversation

From the venue:

Categories: Arts and Culture
In a conversation titled “Guising as God,” Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger of Emory’s Department of Religion and Harshita Mruthinti Kamath of the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies discuss the practice of vesham, using clothing and ornamentation to guise and disguise, across a range of Indian contexts. Drawing on their individual fieldwork, Drs. Flueckiger and Kamath will focus on the transformative potential of vesham, including the possibility of becoming god. The conversation will conclude with a consideration of the transformative possibilities of vesham in the exhibition Transcendent Deities of India: The Everyday Occurrence of the Divine, including the photography of Manjari Sharma and the ornamentation of the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma.