Article
Art and apartheid
Shannen Hill
Apartheid, an Afrikaans word meaning ‘separateness’, was a system of racial segregation in South Africa that curtailed the economic, political, and social rights of black, coloured, and Indian people. Enforced through the legislation of the National Party, apartheid was the rule of the land between 1948 and 1994. Apartheid affected art and art-making in three primary areas: expressions of nationalism; limited access to education and commercial art markets for black, coloured, and Indian artists; and articulations of political resistance to this system of governance.
Although apartheid is equated with the 20th century, its notions of segregation predate this period. As descendants of Dutch settlers who first settled in southern Africa in 1651, Afrikaners were long at odds with people indigenous to this region and with British and German imperialists who sought to colonize it in the 19th century. In Afrikaner lore, the Great Trek (1835–52) represents the spirit of struggle to claim a land in the name of God. The pilgrimage was driven by a desire both to civilize a so-called heathen place through the introduction of Christianity and to establish a republic free of English intrusion in the heartland. This spirit is embodied by Pioneers (...
Article
Baker, Sir Herbert
Gavin Stamp
(b Cobham, Kent, June 9, 1862; d Cobham, Feb 4, 1946).
English architect and writer, also active in South Africa and India. He was articled to a cousin, Arthur Baker, a former assistant of George Gilbert Scott I, in 1879 and attended classes at the Architectural Association and Royal Academy Schools before joining the office of George & Peto in London (1882), where he first met and befriended Edwin Lutyens. Baker set up in independent practice in 1890 but moved to South Africa in 1892 to join his brother Lionel Baker. In Cape Town he met Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, who directed his attention to the traditional European Cape Dutch architecture of the province and asked him to rebuild his house Groote Schuur (1893, 1897), now the official residence of South Africa’s prime ministers. Applying the ideas of the English Arts and Crafts movement to local conditions, Baker produced a series of houses, both in the Cape Province and the Transvaal, which were instrumental in the revival of Cape Dutch architecture. In ...
Article
Bazaar
Mohammad Gharipour
Bazaar, which is rooted in Middle Persian wāzār and Armenian vačaṟ, has acquired three different meanings: the market as a whole, a market day, and the marketplace. The bazaar as a place is an assemblage of workshops and stores where various goods and services are offered.
Primitive forms of shops and trade centres existed in early civilizations in the Near East, such as Sialk, Tepe in Kashan, Çatal Hüyük, Jerico, and Susa. After the 4th millennium BC, the population grew and villages gradually joined together to shape new cities, resulting in trade even with the remote areas as well as the acceleration of the population in towns. The advancement of trade and accumulation of wealth necessitated the creation of trade centres. Trade, and consequently marketplaces, worked as the main driving force in connecting separate civilizations, while fostering a division of labour, the diffusion of technological innovations, methods of intercultural communication, political and economic management, and techniques of farming and industrial production....
Article
Beato family
Italo Zannier
British photographers of Italian origin. Antonio Beato (b ?the Veneto, c. 1830; d Luxor, 1903) and his brother Felice [Felix] Beato (b ?the Veneto, c. 1830; d Mandalay, after 1904) were for many years thought to be one person with two names, Antonio and Felice, and only recently has the mystery been solved of the almost contemporaneous presence of a Beato in two different (and often very distant) places. The misunderstanding arose from the fact that both their names (Antonio Felice Beato) appear on several photographs. A closer inquiry brought to light a letter written by Antonio and published in the French paper, Moniteur de la photographie (1 June 1886), in which he explains that he is not the producer of the exotic photographs recently exhibited in London, mention of which had been made in the Moniteur of 10 March; the photographer was instead ‘[his] brother Monsieur Felice Beato of Japan’....
Article
Bhimji, Zarina
Susan Kart
(b Mbarara, 1963).
Ugandan photographer, film maker, and installation artist of Indian descent, active in the UK. Bhimji was born in Uganda to Indian parents. The family fled Uganda to England in 1972 due to President Idi Amin’s expulsion of all Asians and Asian-Ugandans from the country along with seizure of their property and businesses as part of his ‘economic war’ on Asia. Bhimji studied art at Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art in London and her photographic work primarily consists of close-up, sometimes abstracted glimpses of seemingly abandoned spaces, objects, and landscapes. Bhimji’s work focuses on India and Uganda, which are treated as almost anthropomorphic subjects that appear restless, unfinished, abandoned, or frozen in her photographs, films, and film stills. Bhimji was one of four shortlisted finalists for the Turner Prize in 2007, and her work has been exhibited alongside such artists as El Anatsui, António Olé, Yinka Shonibare, and ...
Article
Bosch, Frederik David Kan
H. I. R. Hinzler
(b Potchefstroom, South Africa, June 17, 1887; d Noordwijk aan Zee, Netherlands, July 20, 1967).
Dutch archaeologist. Educated in the Netherlands, he studied Dutch literature at Leiden University (1906) but then specialized in Sanskrit and Indian archaeology. He was appointed adjunct archaeologist of the Archaeological Survey in Batavia (now Jakarta) under N. J. Krom at the end of 1914, and in 1916 he became head of the Survey and of the Museum of the Batavia Society (now Museum Nasional, Jakarta). He concentrated on epigraphy and started to formulate his ideas on the origin of Hindu–Javanese art. Another topic was the relationship between written and visual sources, particularly with reference to the Borobudur relief series. He also organized restoration and reconstruction projects of various monuments. In 1936 Bosch returned to the Netherlands. He received an extraordinary professorship in archaeology and ancient history of the East Indies in May 1938 in Utrecht and became Krom’s successor in Leiden (1946–57). In 1944 he became president of the archaeological Kern Institute in Leiden and was engaged on the ...
Article
Compound
Anthony D. King
Enclosed and secure space, generally walled or fenced to keep intruders out and also, in different contexts, to keep inhabitants in. In the East and other post-colonial regions, ‘compound’ designates an enclosed space with one or more buildings, frequently occupied by people sharing a nationality or ethnicity other than that of the country in which the compound exists. It can also mean a separate space occupied by members of a kin group.
Like the terms bungalow, godown (warehouse or storeroom) and verandah, compound has its origin in political and cultural processes inherent to colonialism. The word’s origins can be traced, geographically, to the Malay Peninsula, India and China in the 17th century, and, linguistically, to Portuguese, French, Spanish, Malay, Dutch, Javanese and English, all of these having colonial significance. Though of disputed origin, ‘compound’ is generally accepted as an Anglo-Indian term derived from the Malay word kampung or kampong, meaning an enclosure, a fenced-in space or an area of a town....
Article
DeSouza, Allan
Susan Kart
(b Nairobi, 1958).
Kenyan photographer, multimedia and performance artist, and teacher of Indian descent, active in the USA. DeSouza was born in Kenya to Indian parents. Raised in London from the age of 7, he called his background that of a ‘double colonial history’. DeSouza attended Goldsmiths College in London and the Bath Academy of Art, and although he has worked primarily in photography and as a writer on contemporary art, he has also branched out into performance art, digital painting, and textual and mixed media arts. He moved to the USA in 1992 and in 2012 became of Head of Photography at the University of California, Berkeley.
The primary themes in deSouza’s work are those of colonial encounter, seen in Indigena/Assimilado (1998), a photographic series of migrant workers in Los Angeles; migration, as explored in Threshold (1996–8), his early photographic series of airports empty of people; exile, which he explored in ...
Article
Ebony
Gordon Campbell
Article
Emerald
Gordon Campbell
Green variety of Beryl, mined in Upper Egypt and India from antiquity and in Colombia both before and after the Spanish Conquest. Nero is said to have watched gladiatorial contests through an emerald. The two best-known emeralds are the Devonshire Emerald (London, Nat. Hist. Mus.) and the Patricia Emerald (New York, Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist.). The most famous historical emeralds are the 453 emeralds (totalling ...
Article
Khambhat
R. N. Mehta
[CambayKhambhayat]
City at the mouth of the Mali River, c. 84 km south of Ahmadabad in Gujarat, India. Although it was a flourishing commercial centre from the 8th to the 18th century
The remarkable congregational mosque (Jami‛ Masjid), dated by inscription to 1325, consists of an inner courtyard surrounded by a colonnade constructed of pillars from local temples and a prayer-hall with bays marked by low domes; each dome, apart from those above the three prayer niches, or mihrabs, has a corresponding window perforated with lattice patterns in the traditional Gujarati style. Attached to the south side of the mosque is a square, pillared chamber with a ruined circular inner court, housing the intricately carved tomb of the wealthy merchant ...
Article
Le Houelleur, Kaïdin Monique
French and Ivorian, 20th century, female.
Born in Hué, Vietnam.
Sculptor (marble/bronze/wood), installation artist, designer. Artists’ books.
Born of a Vietnamese mother and a French father, Dominique Le Houelleur holds a passion for Africa and lives and works in the Ivory Coast. A self-taught artist, she sought guidence from the Italian sculptor Giorgio Angeli in Querceta where she also met the Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi. In ...
Article
Lotus
Eva Wilson
Term for two distinct decorative motifs based on types of water-lily; one originated in Egypt, the other in India. Lotus motifs in Egypt occur from the beginning of the Dynastic period c. 3000