A Wake for the Apsaras’ is an artistic research project that revolves around an artifact that was acquired by the Rijksmuseum during the Dutch colonial period. The artifact, a stone sculpture of an Apsara, was taken cut out from the sacred grounds of the Khajuraho temple complex in Madhya Pradesh, central India. By contemplating methods of re-appropriation as healing, the project seeks to rescue the Apsara from the temporal, epistemological and aesthetic politics of the ethnographic museum. The following sculptural installation is seen as a gesture, an offering, an honoring and a commencement of the larger goals of this work.
The artifact exhibited in the permanent collection of the Asia Pavilion at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. The sculpture is 3D scanned in high-definition, modeled digitally, 3D printed in ceramics and kiln-fired as a way to bring her back. Through a multi-media installation, the sculpture is laid to rest, by mourning the death of the artifact, we anticipate her rebirth back into our injured cosmologies, knowledges and fractured imaginations.
in collaboration with Ritvik Khushu and Marcos Kueh
