Inhabited Landscapes: Bougault’s Algeria
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY (February 15, 2017) — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces the opening of the exhibition Inhabited Landscapes: Bougault’s Algeria on Saturday, February 18.
Inhabited Landscapes, which will be on view through April 23, features a series of large, panoramic landscapes of Algeria, created during the late-19th and early-20th centuries by the French photographer Alexandre Bougault. The photographs circulated among European and North American audiences through the tourist industry.
The images feature a variety of scenes that at first glance recall the French Romantic Orientalist vision: stoic Arabian Camels amid an endless Saharan expanse, large groups of cloaked figures kneeling in prayer, a sea of low slung clay buildings, and women gathering water in a palm-filled oasis.
This project invites a new reading of the photographs as spaces where the notions of identity, loss, presence, and power shape the complex relations between the Algerian terrain and its inhabitants. The landscapes can be seen to reveal a series of paradoxes, making visible the conundrum of European Imperialism – the desire to modernize a “primitive” land, while at the same time longing to experience and represent it as untouched by Western modernization.
EVENTS
Lecture
Exhibition curator Ana-Joel Falcón-Wiebe will speak about her research at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, February 21, in the Somers Room of the Tang Teaching Museum. The event is organized by the Skidmore College Art History Department is free and open to the public.
Curator’s Tour
Exhibition curator Ana-Joel Falcón-Wiebe will give a tour of the exhibition at noon Wednesday, April 1. The tour is free and open to the public.
For More information, Tang Museum’s Website
