Phantom Punch: Contemporary Art from Saudi Arabia in Lewiston

On Wed. Feb. 1 at 6:00 p.m. in LPL’s Callahan Hall we will be hosting Bates College Anthropology Professor Loring Danforth to talk about the ongoing exhibit at the Bates College Museum of Art entitled, Phantom Punch: Contemporary Art from Saudi Arabia in Lewiston. This exhibition was curated by Professor Danforth along with Dan Mills, the director of the Bates Museum.

The images most Americans have of Saudi Arabia are frighteningly predictable – deserts, camels, and oil; Sharia law, Islamic fundamentalism, and jihad; rich sheikhs in white robes, oppressed women in black veils, and terrorists. In this talk Danforth will challenge these destructive Orientalist stereotypes by introducing the relatively unknown world of contemporary Saudi art. The work of young Saudi artists presents a unique insiders perspective on Saudi society and culture that offers more nuanced and complex portraits of Saudi Arabia than those that circulate in the American media: an open air mosque made out of chain link fencing, Yoda sitting next to King Faisal as Saudi Arabia joins the United Nations, and a Saudi woman painting a junked car pink.

Loring M. Danforth is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology at Bates College. He and his wife Margaret Rotundo have lived in Lewiston since 1978. He spent most of his academic career working in Greece and Macedonia. He is the author of The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton University Press 1982), Firewalking and Religious Healing:  The Anastenaria of Greece and the American Firewalking Movement. (Princeton University Press 1989), The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World. (Princeton University Press 1995), and Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory (with coauthor Riki Van Boeschoten, University of Chicago Press 2012).

In 2012 Danforth spent a month in Saudi Arabia with a group of Bates students. Then in 2016 he published Crossing the Kingdom: Portraits of Saudi Arabia based on his experiences there (University of California Press). In July 2016, he spent three weeks in Saudi Arabia interviewing artists for an essay that appears in the exhibition catalog of Phantom Punch: Contemporary Art from Saudi Arabia in Lewiston.

The Phantom Punch exhibition is currently on view at the Bates College Museum of Art and will run through March 18, 2017.

For more information on the Phantom Punch exhibit, contact the Bates Museum at 786-6158 or museum@Bates.edu; for details on the Feb. 1 LPL talk contact the library’s Adult/Teen Services Desk at 513-3135 or LPLReference@Gmail.com