By JACQUELINE HARGREAVES
We've been busy.
We approach the end of 2019 having completed three years of fieldwork in India, where we visited over thirty-five libraries, government institutions and private collections. Our most recent scholarly efforts have focussed on collating critical editions of unedited Sanskrit works, writing (six!) academic articles, producing a film that reconstructs Yoga through philological means, maintaining an open-access, peer-reviewed journal, collaborating with the AyurYog Project to develop an interactive historical timeline and exhibition on the history of Ayurveda and Yoga, prepping for University summer schools, delivering workshops and trainings based on our original research to Yoga professionals, and curating a forthcoming exhibition in London. Perhaps a little too ambitious? We feel completely overwhelmed with many deadlines looming. Nonetheless, we do hope our efforts will be worth the toil as we prepare to open our much anticipated exhibition in the new year.
Please do pop in!
EMBODIED LIBERATIONThe Textual, Ethnographic and Historical Research of the Hatha Yoga Project.
Brunei Gallery | 16th January - 21st March 2020
In the gloriously petite Foyle Room of the Brunei Gallery at SOAS University of London, the exhibition, Embodied Liberation, will highlight the most recent research discoveries in the field of Yoga Studies as identified by the Hatha Yoga Project, SOAS.
The exhibition will lead the audience through different chronological periods of Yoga’s history using a variety of visual and interactive mediums which derive from the diverse methodological approaches used by the research team. Handwritten Sanskrit manuscripts, which are fascinating samples of the principal textual discoveries of the project, will be on display. A vivid Mughal painting of pre-modern asceticism will be contrasted with photographs and video material sourced during extensive ethnographic fieldwork of present-day ascetic practitioners in India, including very rare examples of female practitioners.
Two of the highlights of the exhibition will be photographs of the oldest known sculptures of complex Yoga postures (i.e., the twelfth-century Mehudī Gate of Gujarat, India) and a multimedia video installation of 'embodied philology' - the reconstruction of the āsanas (along with Sanskrit recitation and English translation) of the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati, an eighteenth-century Sanskrit manual on the practice of haṭhayoga, which is one of the ten critical editions to be published by the project.
Find out more about the Hatha Yoga Project.
