Detail: Scheduled to be shown concurrently with `Bardo’, this exhibition which will present works of art that have been used for centuries to prepare the initiate for death and take up the notion of death as revelatory act, which is a distinguishing characteristic of this Tibetan religion.
The exhibition will demonstrate the manifold representations of death and afterlife in Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism from approximately the 14th century to the present. The various ways death has been viewed throughout history in the West will be explored and, similarly, Tibetan Buddhist imagery of death is used to remind practitioners of their mortality and impermanence as an incentive to diligently make use of this precious human rebirth, where they have an opportunity through religious practice to break from the cycle of suffering. Ritual implements made from human bone, macabre depictions of charnel ground scenes as ideal places for meditation and violent imagery of wrathful deities tearing at corpses, are, among other things, expressions of the traumatic act of slaying the ego, the primary impediment to enlightenment. Death, as a synonym for the endless suffering of cyclic existence, and the theme of death is also used as a metaphor for an entire system of Tantric meditation practice.