Slade Lectures 2027
Slade Lectures 2027 | Core Concepts of Jaina Art: Visuality and the Jaina Tradition in India and the Diaspora
Image credit: Julia A.B. Hegewald
Sculptural Absence: Jaina Iconography and the Concept of Body Abandonment
Prof. Dr. Julia A.B. Hegewald
5pm Wednesday 20 January 2027
Auditorium, St John's College, University of Oxford
(Free Admission)
Leaving behind all worldly attachments, liberating the mind and finally abandoning one’s own body at death play crucial roles in Jaina religious thought and ritual practice. For this reason, the concept of absence is a central theme in Jaina sculptural expressions. The idea of a bodiless soul without materiality or shape presented the artists working for the Jaina community with a creative challenge. In this context, they fashioned empty cut-out silhouettes of the fully enlightened, disembodied souls (siddhas), providing simply the contour of their former bodily shape. They also fashioned foot representations which resemble imprints, marking the last contact of saintly teachers with the ground before their release. In addition, there will be discussion of the perceived total mental and spiritual absence attributed to fully represented, material figural icons carved in the round, which were fashioned of the twenty-four enlightened saints (Jinas), as well as the emaciation of an ideal Jaina practitioner’s own ascetic body.
Julia A.B. Hegewald is Professor of Oriental Art History and Head of the Department of Asian and Islamic Art History at the University of Bonn. She was a Research Fellow at University College Oxford (1998-2005), Head of an Emmy-Noether-Research Group (German Research Foundation, DFG, 2005-2014) and Reader in Non-Western Art History at Manchester University (2007-2010). Since taking up the Chair in Oriental Art History at Bonn in 2010, Julia Hegewald has been active in a number of international research initiatives. Amongst the most recent are the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS, 2018-2025, 2026-2032), the ERC Synergy Grant Mantrams and the ERC Consolidator Grant ID-Scapes. She has published widely on the art and architecture of the Jaina community in India, most notably Jaina Temple Architecture in India: The Development of a Distinct Language in Space and Ritual (2009, 2018, 2024). In recent years, she has engaged intensively with the Digambara Jaina tradition in the south Indian state of Karnataka, with a number of publications, including The Jaina Heritage: Distinction, Decline and Resilience (2011), Jaina Tradition of the Deccan: Shravanabelagola, Mudabidri, Karkala (2021), Jaina Culture in Medieval Karnataka: Dominance, Dependency and Endurance (2025) and Jainism under Threat: Extreme Forms of Dependency in Medieval Karnataka, South India (2026).
