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MUSEUM news 60 ABOVE: Mask, chumliiq, the fi rst Sugpiaq. Sugpiat, Kodiak, Alaska. © RMN-Grand Palais, Benoît Touchard. UPPER RIGHT: Detail of a contemporary double ikat from Gujarat, India. Silk, natural pigments. BELOW: Skull. Asmat, Papua province, Indonesia. Human skull, feathers, basketry, shell. H: 27 cm. Liliane and Michel Durand- Dessert Collection. Photo © François Doury. THE WORLD OF IKAT London—Until June 25, 2016, London’s Brunei Gallery at SOAS is presenting World Ikat Textiles … Ties that Bind, a comprehensive exhibition conceived of and curated by Edric Ong and Manjari Nirula to celebrate the ikat technique that is used in many places throughout the world in textile making. Ikat is a process of dyeing and weaving in which the design is created by first dyeing the weft threads with all the colors that will be needed at particular intervals and in such a way that the elements of the design will emerge by the juxtaposition of the colored sections when the textile is woven. The installation presents more than two hundred examples of textiles created using this complex technique. They come from places as diverse as Indonesia, Cambodia, India, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Western Africa, Latin America, and Spain. These remarkable works of textile art are complemented by weaving demonstrations, videos, and a symposium. ALASKA PAST/PRESENT Boulogne-sur-Mer—With more than 220 objects, 115 of which are from the Kodiak Archipelago, the Musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer’s Alaskan collection is unusually strong in this little-seen area. It is especially famous for the group of seventy Sugpiat masks collected by Alphonse Louis Pinart, who, in 1871 at the age of nineteen, took a one-year trip to Alaska to conduct research that might support his hypothesis that the autochthonous peoples of this part of the world originated in Asia. These masks, which have been in the Musée de Boulogne-sur- Mer since Pinart donated them in 1875, fascinated Sven Haakanson Jr., then the director of Kodiak’s Alutiiq Museum, who became aware of them in 2002 while doing preparatory work for the inaugural exhibition Kodiak, Alaska at the Musée du Quai Branly, which was then still under construction. In order that this important patrimony could be made accessible to the contemporary Sugpiat community, Haakanson proposed sending several native artists to France. This took place in June of 2006, and the arrival of nine Kodiak artists in Boulogne-sur-Mer heralded the beginning of an ambitious partnership and a cultural engagement the tenth anniversary of which the exhibition Alaska Past/Present celebrates. On view at the Musée de Boulogne-sur-Mer from June 25 until December 5, 2016, this show is enhanced by loans, and it focuses both on the history of the peoples of Alaska, and on the cultural renewal that has been underway for some forty years, finding eloquent expression through contemporary artistic activity. CARAMBOLAGES Paris—Through July 4, 2016, the Grand Palais is hosting Carambolages (Ricochet), an exhibition that, like all the events produced by Jean-Hubert Martin, invites its viewers to free themselves of their prejudices and to take a fresh look at the world and particularly its art. Having brought non-European art to the public’s attention in 1989 with his Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the Earth) exhibition, Martin’s attention is now focused on breaking down the barriers established by traditional approaches to art in the West, instead speaking to the imagination of the individual. The result is a well-thought-out sequence of works that transcends the time periods and cultures they originate from and the styles they represent. In this context, each piece acquires new meaning, different from the one that comes before it as well as the one that follows. Tribal works take center stage in this playful and aesthetic experience, which underlies a search for a new standard in the approach to art that recognizes no chronological or geographic boundaries.


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