Amy Allocco, an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, delivered a lecture titled “Visual Language, Architecture, and Memory in the Collages of a Contemporary Tamil Muslim Artist” at the Dishman Museum at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas on Friday, Nov. 4, 2011.
She was invited to deliver this guest lecture in conjunction with a major solo exhibition of the collages of M.G. Raffic Ahamed, a Muslim artist from South India with whom Allocco has been acquainted since 2003.
Featuring more than four dozen of the Indian artist’s mixed-media collages and on display at the Dishman Museum until November 23, 2011, the exhibition is titled “Anandam” (bliss) to highlight the feeling that inspires Raffic’s creative process. Allocco’s lecture explored a number of themes in Raffic’s work, and focused especially on the issues prompted by India’s religious diversity and the gendered tensions of contemporary Indian social life.
She also discussed the dialectic between “tradition” and “modernity” in Raffic’s collages and related his visual meditations on this interplay to the questions about form and content that animate a great deal of post-Independence Indian art.
Attended by a mix of faculty, students, and community members, Allocco’s hour-long lecture was followed by a lengthy question-and-answer session and concluded with a reception.