This is a past event
Mary Magdalene in the Museum (Lieke Wijnia, Museum Catharijneconvent, The Netherlands)
This event will be hosted by Zoom; please email simon.constantine@abdn.ac.uk for joining instructions.
Over the past years, a dedicated project team has worked on a major exhibition about Mary Magdalene for Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The exhibition, which will run from 25 June 2021 until 9 January 2022, explores the enigmatic Biblical woman through art and material culture from various religious traditions as well as popular culture. Given her dynamic reception history, how can an exhibition do justice to Mary Magdalene’s multiplicity? What is the significance that this exhibition is staged in a museum for Christian heritage instead of an art or ethnographic museum? And how is the visitor experience anticipated in the exhibition design? These questions will be addressed during this talk, in which Lieke Wijnia sheds light on the curatorial considerations in staging Mary Magdalene: The Exhibition.
Dr. Lieke Wijnia is an art historian and religious studies scholar. She works as curator at Museum Catharijneconvent. She obtained a BA in Humanities at University College Utrecht, an MA in Heritage Studies at Utrecht University and an MA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. In 2016 she defended her PhD thesis at Tilburg University, on perceptions of the sacred in contemporary culture. Her postdoctoral research focuses on the sacred in modern art and its heritagization. She is the author of Beyond the Return of Religion: Art and the Postsecular (Brill 2018) and co-editor of The Bible and Global Tourism (Bloomsbury/ T&T Clark 2021). She is the curator of Mary Magdalene: The Exhibition (2021-22) and has edited its accompanying publication Mary Magdalene: Chief Witness, Sinner, Feminist (2021).
Image: Alfred Stevens, Mary Magdalene, 1887, Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent.