South Asia Center presents: Padma Kaimal

Padma Kaimal Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History and Asian Studies, Colgate University Many Paths to the Divine: Dynamics of Vision in a Hindu Temple What can it mean to interpret a temple, to get at what and how a building meant to the people who built it and to those who first moved through its spaces, past its sculptures, paintings, and the words written on its walls? After attempting to fix – like a butterfly to a board – the meaning of the 8th-century Kailasanatha temple near the modern city of Chennai, Kaimal now explores more fluid mechanisms for the operation of meaning at this influential South Asian monument. A series of clusters, threads, and webs of signs variously enfold parts of this temple complex, shifting with the viewer’s movements and the angle of light, connecting and dividing like the pieces of an elegant puzzle with multiple solutions.