Time Travel by Thangka: Tibetan Treasures at the Asian Art Museum 2017.02.15

Non-CAS Event
Wednesday, February 15, 2017, 12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Lower Level Lecture Room, North Building, Denver Art Museum

For six hundred years, Tibet has been home to a religious tradition based on texts called the terma or treasures. Some of these texts occur in the context of thangka paintings or rare illuminated manuscripts; some were even viewed as actual bodies of the figures represented on them. Using the rich visual and narrative sources available in Tibetan thangka paintins associated with the terma tradition recovered form a monastery called Riwoche; this presentation explores how artworks associated with this tradition share many thematic and formal characteristics with tradition of speculative fiction more or less recently produced by Euro-American authors. Among these themes and characteristics are virtual bodies, time travel, altered identities, signs of a special destiny, and coded messages designed to be discovered at just the right time.

Jeffrey Durham is a museum curator creating cutting-edge art exhibitions that challenge boundaries of genre, culture, and identity such as Enter the Mandala, an exhibit using Tibetan thangka paintings to create a tantric mandala in the Asian Art Museum's architectural space, with the goal of having the visitor question, "Am I in the mandala, or is the mandala in me?" An experienced professor and historian of sacred art, with emphasis on South Asian and Himalayan sculpture and painting, Dr. Durham speaks / reads five languages at a professional working level and four more at a limited level, and he is a registered yoga teacher. Among his many publications is the catalog for a 2015 exhibit at AAM, Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey to Enlightenment.

Ticket prices and information can be found here.