Via Yogacityny

This week I’m going to change things up a bit and write about the “Yoga: The Art of Transformation” exhibit down in DC. If you haven’t heard yet, the Freer | Sackler Museum at the Smithsonian put together a “leitmotif” of two thousand years of yoga art.

The exhibit is amazingly great, with weathered sculpture from ancient temples to miniature paintings from the medieval era to post-structuralist reinterpretations of the colonial-era photos of costumed-up ascetics. If you’re a yogi with a bent for art or history, be sure to catch it.

For me personally one of the key insights of the exhibition and its supporting scholarship was how instrumental photography and film have been in the development of “modern yoga”. Few of us probably know that the modern, postural yoga we practice today was developed only in the 1930 – 50s, by Krishnamacharya and his successors. Fewer still probably know the extent to which these pioneers relied on photography and film not just to popularize their redefined yoga but also to develop it.

Prior to the 1930s, there were some seated postures and austerities described in ancient texts and performed by ascetics, but nothing like the aerobic sequences taught by Krishnamacharya and Jois. When pre-modern artists weren’t depicting deities, they would draw the body conceptually, as a map of the universe or subtle energy channels, like the Chakras and Nadis.

Read more here — YOGA

Name: Yoga The Art of Transformation

Museum: Sackler Gallery

Location: Sublevel 1

Description: Through masterpieces of Indian sculpture and paintings, this exhibition explores yoga’s goals; its Hindu, as well as Buddhist, Jain, and Sufi manifestations; its means of transforming body and consciousness; and its profound philosophical foundations. It is the first exhibition to present this leitmotif of Indian visual culture and examines the roles of yogis and yoginis played in Indian society over two thousand years.

More than 120 works, from the 3rd century to the early 20th century, illuminate yoga’s central tenets as well as its obscured histories. Temple sculptures, devotional icons, illustrated manuscripts, court paintings, photographs, books, and films are on view. Borrowed from 25 museums and private collections in India, Europe, and the United States, its highlights include an installation that reunites for the first time three monumental stone yogini goddesses from a 10th-century Chola temple; 10 folios from the first illustrated compilation of asanas (yogic postures), which was made for a Mughal emperor in 1602 and has never been exhibited in the United States; and a Thomas Edison film, Hindoo Fakir (1906), the first movie ever produced about India.

I spent the last few nights watching the miniseries The Bible. Throughout the ten episodes you will learn a lot and experience many different epics of The Holy Bible. It is a wonderful testament to the enduring power of the incredible text. I highly recommend watching it.

Check out the video below for the scene depicting David, the shepherd from Bethlehem, taking down Goliath, the giant Philistine warrior.