Iraq Museum, Ca' Foscari presents the many faces of the “Lady of Warka”

Share
condividi

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the Iraq Museum and the Italian Embassy in Baghdad will present “The Lady of Warka and the Archaeology of Meanings” on Wednesday December 6th, a scientific and artistic bilateral project on one of the first sculptural representations of the human face: the Lady of Warka. The event will take place at 11am at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The presentation dedicated to the Mesopotamian art piece will be open until March 6th 2018 with the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation as well as the UNESCO.

The carved marble female face known as the Lady of Warka was sculpted in white alabaster more than 5,000 years ago. It was excavated by a German expedition in 1938 in the ancient site of Uruk in a place of worship, probably as the representation of goddess Inanna. It was later exhibited as an archaic Sumerian icon. It disappeared in 2003 with the looting of the museum and was fortunately returned undamaged a few months later.

The face sculpted in 3,200 B.C. is at the center of the project and will be positioned on a new pedestal in transparent synthetic materials that will give a comprehensive view of the piece. The mysterious face of the lady was explored in images taken within the scientific and artistic project of Lucio Milano, professor at Ca’ Foscari, and Giorgia Fiorio, artist and photographer.

The research project inspired a cross-disciplinary dialogue on the extraordinary cultural relevance and value of the Lady of Warka and many questions, as a tool for an archaeology of the immaterial investigating the dialogue between the sculpture’s face looking at humans and human faces looking at the sculpture.

This project aims at raising awareness and strengthening everyone’s accountability towards our shared cultural heritage and its transmission.

In the piece Eikona three photogrammetric displays of 36 images extracted from a 360° topography texturing the entire surface of the original masterpiece. Paradeigma is composed of four transcriptions that will be exhibited in front of the Lady of Warka offering four sets of images taken from the sculpture and organized in two ensemble of four and nine elements. It addresses the many different aspects of the piece emerging from the perception of its many viewers.

“What happens to our brain when we look at the face or at the eyes of a sculpture?” This is one of the many questions raised in the research, explained Lucio Milano, scientific director of Humanum and professor of Near Eastern History at the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari. “To answer such a question we explore reciprocity created when two faces are confronting each other, a human’s face and the one of an anthropomorphic sculpture. And we are able to do that with one of the oldest remain in sculpture history”.