Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Wise One, a Warrior: Volume 3

A Wise One, a Warrior: Volume 3

Kandasamy, Meena

Paperback

Series: Objects Talk Back

General ArchitectureIndian & South Asian Art

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 303580754X
ISBN13: 9783035807547
Publisher: Diaphanes
Published: Sep 25 2025
Pages: 48
Weight: 0.05
Height: 0.40 Width: 4.20 Depth: 6.70
Language: English
A narrative of the early modern Indian sculpture known as the Mithuna couple.

Meena Kandasamy writes about the Mithuna couple, a seventeenth-century ivory sculpture from Tamil Nadu, India, depicting lovers. Kandasamy unfurls a multi-layered, multi-directional narrative built from images, questions, and contradictions evoked by the sculpture. How can we look at this work and not talk about who produced it? Kandasamy asks and then examines how caste and class are carved into the object as indelibly as its physical details. Such knowledge complicates easy associations of love that may be evoked by the couple.

Refusing any impulse to idealize or exoticize, Kandasamy connects the carving to personal and political stories that expose painful realities of who gets to love whom, and how. She sets the intimate alongside the institutional to interrogate terms such as decolonize, restitution, and preservation. Through an astonishing stylistic mix, including Twitter, academic discourse, poetry, and memoir, she talks back, forward, and sideways with the object.

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