Slade Lectures 2027

The art and architecture of the Jaina religious community, which originated in India in around the sixth century BCE, is part of the wider environment of Indic cultures, with which it shares many common elements, and is firmly embedded in its South Asian sacred and artistic context. However, Jaina visual and material culture is unique in a number of ways. The idiosyncratic elements which contribute to this distinctiveness will form the focus of the Slade Lecture series 2027. The six lectures will centre on four visual components: absence, multiplicity, complexity and replication, as well as on the elements of sustainability and continuity, which are necessary to guarantee the survival of any faith and its associated visual cultural traditions. These general topics will be examined in the framework of six different media, religious expressions and contexts: sculpture, architecture, cosmography, pilgrimage, cultural tradition and globalism. Through the six combined lenses of sculptural absence, architectural multiplicity, cosmic complexity, pilgrimage replication, cultural sustainability and global continuity, I shall introduce the audience to the religious foundations of Jaina visuality and its intriguing individual forms of expression. In addition to this close Jaina focus, the lectures will tell us a lot about Indic traditions more generally and will encourage us to reconsider the visual expressions of our own cultural backgrounds from a fresh point of view.

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).