Curator’s Talk: “Old Gods | New Gods” at ATHICA

Curator’s Talk: “Old Gods | New Gods: Ethnographic Crossings: Culture and Violence” by Peter Brosius, Sarah Hitchner, and Alden DiCamillo at ATHICA

As a final wrap up for public events related to New Gods | Old Gods, please come listen to the stories behind and thoughts about collaborating across cultures and disciplines when addressing histories of violence.

Made Bayak’s visual practice merges images and symbols from Balinese cosmology and current Balinese political and ecological movements to bring attention to parasitic real estate development and past actions of violence within Bali. The colorful and piercing narrative works that will be on exhibition use waste plastic and trash, ink, acrylic paint, stencils, and traditional Balinese painting techniques to tell the most difficult stories of Balinese history. Additional documentary photographs and videos of his work and contextual information about Bali will be exhibited alongside.

Made Bayak’s work is brought to ATHICA by the curators Dr. Peter Brosius and Alden DiCamillo. Dr. Brosius is a Distinguished Research Professor in the UGA Department of Anthropology; Alden DiCamillo is an interdisciplinary artist, graduate student with the UGA Lamar Dodd School of Art, and ATHICA intern. Together with their colleague, Dr. Sarah Hitchner, Assistant Research Scientist at UGA, they are conducting research on how Made Bayak’s work weaves narratives of explicit and implicit violence into a visual activism that boldly uses innovative material experimentation combined with wildly energetic portrayals of Balinese cosmology. Anthropologists Brosius and Hitchner have conducted long-term research in Indonesia and Malaysia regarding threats to cultural landscapes and displacement of indigenous communities through land degradation and violent real estate policy.