Dangerous Enchantments: The Painted Melodies of Yoginis

15 January 2023

For centuries, philosophers in India wrote that paintings should be looked at with insight. This talk is about the ways we look into paintings and about how paintings look back at us. It is about what a look does to us: how it conveys sound and feeling, how it can give us goosebumps and make us fall in love, and how it can enchant us to leave ourselves behind.  Paintings once commanded that kind of look and people once yielded to it. Dangerous Enchantments explores the power that paintings of yoginis once had to bless or bedevil those who looked at them and to lure them into dangerous places of the mind and heart.