austerefrivolity:

I saw this sculpture on vacation. It’s called “Leap of Faith” I spent some time staring at it, and it really struck me. I will never claim to be an expert or understand art but the thought that the artist is portraying really was beautiful. The man appears to be stoic, as if nothing is bothering him but literally sprouting from his head is another man taking the “leap.” The inner turmoil is a struggle, it occupies his every thought but he keeps his ground. I really loved this. I hope to have the courage to do this, to be this.

The Craziest Light Show Ever. Period. (Click for Video)

Have you ever been to church and seen the light? Well at the recent Light Festival in Ghent, Belgium, the Luminarie De Cagna created an LED cathedral that lit up the entire city of Belfortstraat with a glowing psychedelic aura. The result is arguably beautiful enough to make anybody a believer.

The LED Cathedral mixes Romanesque and Renaissance architecture with glowing rainbow ornamentation. It stands 91 feet tall at its peak and is made of 55,000 LED lights.

German artist Lukas Werth presents his comparative view of socio-cultural lifestyle of Germany and Pakistan || Pakistan Today

A collection of photographs by Lukas Werth, featuring the socio-cultural lifestyle of two great countries, Pakistan and Germany, was unveiled here on Monday at the Rohtas Gallery. Through his lens, the German artist has presented a comparison of the two countries with the “East meets West” theme. The classic photography cache titled ‘Twilight’ has been produced by using the century-old technical gadget called ‘view camera’. The large size photographs showcasing cultural heritage and social-economic life of cities including Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Lahore, Munich, Berlin and others. Since December 2008, Lukas Werth has been teaching anthropology at LUMS. Having received his PhD in 1992 from the Free University of Berlin for an ethnography about the Vagri, a peripatetic group in South India. Deeply involved in photography both as an anthropological endeavor and as an art form.

He regards photography as an independent form of visual art capable of making statements relevant to the contemporary world. He combines this with his anthropological interests, that is, he explores an artistic vision inspired by anthropological perspectives. One main topic of this combination is the exploration of cultural contexts in Pakistan which he tries to present in a personal vision, leading away from common Western prejudices, and also appealing to a spectator familiar with the contexts depicted. His theoretical interests include meaning, self, ethics and aesthetics in Anthropological thought; different aspects of religion as such, Islam, including Sufism and fundamentalism, Hinduism, kinship, rituals, concepts of modernity and Western thought, and peripatetic societies. Areas of his ethnographic interests are South Asia, most notably Pakistan and India, Western contexts, as the development of Western visual arts and the place of photography in this context.

Talking to Pakistan Today, Lukas Werth, said he wanted to develop an expressive vision of his work on Sufism, a vision which should somehow reflect the beauty involved in this concept, the beauty over and above every flaw, every imperfection, every distortion or manipulation which might be found, and that he wanted to be able to communicate this to audiences familiar as well as foreign to the scenes shown.

“Secondly, in recent years, the Western perspective on the Islamic world has become more and more antagonistic. I use a consciously subjective perspective which amounts, or so I hope, to a personal vision of a tradition which evokes feelings of homeliness and beauty for those who are willing to see,” he added.

Read More

The Met’s New Islamic Galleries - NYT

In 2003 the Islamic galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed for renovation, and one of the world’s premier collections of Islamic art more or less vanished into storage.

The timing, barely two years after the events of Sept. 11, was unfortunate, if unavoidable. Just when we needed to learn everything we could about Islamic culture, a crucial teaching tool disappeared.

As of Tuesday the learning can go forward. The Met’s Islamic collection returns to view in what are now being called the galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.

The new, much expanded installation — organized by Sheila Canby, the curator in charge of the department of Islamic art, with Navina Najat Haidar as project coordinator — is as intelligent as it is visually resplendent. The art itself, some 1,200 works spanning more than 1,000 years, is beyond fabulous. An immense cultural vista — necessary, liberating, intoxicatingly pleasurable — has been restored to the city.

As its title implies, that vista has been carefully thought out and framed. Rather than presenting Islamic art as the product of a religiously driven monoculture encompassing centuries and continents, the Met is now — far more realistically — approaching it as a varied, changing, largely secular phenomenon, regionally rooted but absorptively cosmopolitan, affected by the intricacies and confusions of history, including the history that the art itself helped to create.

At the same time certain visual binders are evident. You see one — language — the instant you enter the first gallery. The written word is omnipresent. Whether in the form of love poems, proverbs or passages from Islam’s holy book, the Koran, calligraphy spreads like a fine net over everything, creating an art that almost literally speaks.

Beautiful St. John’s Bible Features Hand-Drawn Images, Calligraphy; Apostles Edition To Be Gifted To The Morgan Library And Museum

relright:

urhajos:

I Can Read

I love it

minimalmovieposters:

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by Adam Rabalais

(via mugglenet)

(Source: embracethelion)