CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – An award-winning author who studies the religious culture of Braj, India, will be the featured speaker at the opening of an exhibition of work by landscape architecture graduate students at the University of Illinois. The students are collaborating with officials in India to restore a sacred site that is endangered by the incursion of religious pilgrims.
The exhibit, titled “Govardhan Hill in Braj, India: Imagined, Enacted and Reclaimed by Landscape Architecture 438,” will feature photo essays, architectural drawings and proposals for restoration of Mount Gorvardhan, a hill near Mathura, India, that is revered by Hindus for its association with the god Krishna.
More than 50 million pilgrims visit its temples and shrines and perform circumambulatory tours there annually. Landscape architecture graduate students studied and visited the site at the invitation of the Braj Foundation, a non-governmental organization developing the region.
Seven students led by landscape architecture professor Amita Sinha conducted a site study of the existing landscape during January and developed proposals for eco-restoration, which they presented to Braj officials during their visit. The project was part of a studio design course that Sinha is teaching this semester that focuses on integrating cultural beliefs and practices with environmental planning and design, restoration and management efforts.
“The students had first-hand experience of many rituals of pilgrimage and saw for themselves the prevailing religiosity of the site, and how people there are venerating nature and worshiping the hill and its water bodies,” Sinha said. “We did extensive photography – similar to visual anthropology – of the hill and people living on it, its flora and fauna and of pilgrimage there.
“The exhibit captures the different modes of transcendental and aesthetic experiences created through walking, sensory immersion in worship rituals and participation in myth re-enactment of Krishna myths at specific sites. It interprets how the landscape is conceptualized, visualized and inscribed in the body.”
Sinha plans to prepare a catalog of the students’ work that also will serve as a project report, and after the exhibit concludes, the pieces will be turned over to the Braj Foundation.
David Haberman, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University who has spent the last 25 years researching the culture of Braj and wrote an award-winning book about his work, will open the exhibit with a lecture titled “Faces in the Trees.” Haberman will speak at 11 a.m. on April 19 in the gallery of Temple Hoyne Buell Hall, 611 Lorado Taft Drive, Champaign.
The exhibit will run through April 23.
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