Categorie: News

• When: Tuesday 25 November 2025, at 17:00 (5 pm CET)
• Where: Faculteitszaal, Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
• online attendance: please register through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipUpMvk6 

Abstract

This lecture will present a highly influential corpus of Buddhist historiographies, composed and expanded upon from perhaps the 12th c. CE onward. These works are attributed, as so-called ‘treasure texts,’ to the 7th-c. emperor Songtsen ‘the Profound’ (Tib. srong-btsan sgam-po), himself claimed to be an emanation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. This corpus constitutes a literary meeting ground for a series of pivotal developments in the realm of Tibetan Buddhist religion, political philosophy, and perceptions of Tibet and its people at large. Weaving compelling tales of Tibetan society’s history, it played a central role in formulating and propagating understandings of Tibet as a Buddhist realm under Avalokiteśvara’s special protection. Though eminently focused on Tibet, these works are also embedded in interregional webs of cultural exchange, potentially drawing inspiration from Indian sūtra literature, Newari Buddhism, Chinese and Khotanese notions of bodhisattva kingship, and more. This talk will introduce this body of works, discuss the particular text-historical and methodological challenges it presents, and show what we may hope to gain from its study.

The Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies (GCSAS) and the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies (GCBS) are pleased to host the second talk in the Fall 2025 iteration of the Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series on 20 November 2025:

Title

Speakers

Time & venue

• Thursday, 20 November 2025 at 17:00 (5 pm CET)
• in person: Faculteitszaal, Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte, Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
• remotely: please register through this Google Form

Abstract

Bios

The third and final screening event of the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies (GCSAS) for November 2025 on the artistic and religious landscapes of India takes place in Antwerp in collaboration with the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi), University of Antwerp.

Filmmaker and exhibition curator Harsha Vinay will be present to introduce and discuss his work. The programme features two of his documentaries, exploring the ritual and material worlds of Jainism and Hinduism—millennia-old religions that continue to thrive globally, including in Belgium’s vibrant Indian community of Antwerp.
Both films merge ethnography and aesthetics, transforming museum projects into cinematic explorations of how religion is lived, performed, and materialised.

After the screening, an open discussion with the filmmaker moderated by researchers from GCSAS and ViDi will delve into heritage documentation, and the role of film in representing living traditions.

TIME & VENUE

• When: Thursday 13 November 2025, from 17:00 to 19:00 (5 pm – 7 pm CET)
• Where: S.M.003, De Meerminne (Stadscampus), Faculty of Social Sciences – University of Antwerp, Sint-Jacobstraat 2, 2000 Antwerp
• Contacts: letizia.trinco@ugent.be; sara.mondini@ugent.be; paolosh.favero@uantwerpen.be

OPEN TO ALL. NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

TRAILERS

Short Films for Being Jain. Art and Culture of an Indian Religion
2022

Originally made for the Museum Rietberg’s exhibition Being Jain. Art and Culture of an Indian Religion (2022-2023), these short films explore key aspects of ritual and material culture within Jainism — including pilgrimage, asceticism, manuscript traditions, ritual death, and everyday lay practices — and have since been screened across the USA, Europe, and India.

Mirrors of Malabar
2019

Produced for the Museum Rietberg’s exhibition THE MIRROR – Our Reflected Self (2019) and subsequently screened internationally, Mirrors of Malabar document the making and ritual use of mirrors in worship and possession practices of coastal Kerala (southwestern India).

Guest speaker’s bio

Harsha Vinay is the Founder Director of Green Barbet Ltd, India, with over ten years’ experience in curating exhibitions for international museums, cultural programming, administering an artist residency, production of research publications and documentary films.

Harsha holds an MA from the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a BFA in Painting from College of Fine Art, Bangalore. From 2013 to 2015 he worked at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore, as Assistant Curator in-charge of exhibitions, programmes and outreach. Prior to this he was the ‘Specialist Writer & Subject Expert’ on the curatorial team of the ICCR sponsored exhibition ‘The Body in Indian Art and Thought’, Bruxelles 2013. Here, Harsha was entrusted with research and collation of documentary films from the archives of the IGNCA and Sangeet Natak Akademi on the living traditions of India.

In 2016, Harsha Vinay moved to Varanasi as Director of the Alice Boner Institute, a residency space for academic and artistic research founded to keep alive the legacy of Swiss artist and scholar Padma Bhushan Dr. Alice Boner. Here he organised artist residencies, exhibitions, symposiums, and cultural events with a range of international institutions.

In 2018, Harsha started his own cultural enterprise in Bangalore – ‘Green Barbet: a company for art and culture in South Asia‘, which provides consultancy and advisory services for museums and cultural organisations within and outside India. Under the aegis of this company, Harsha Vinay has co-curated and collaborated on large exhibitions at Museum Rietberg, including ‘Alice Boner – Artist and Scholar’, 2015-18, ‘Mirror – The Reflected Self’, 2018-19, ‘Being Jain: Art and Culture of an Indian Religion’, 2022-23 and more recently ‘Ragamala – Pictures for all the Senses‘, 2024-25.

Harsha has organised numerous international programmes such as Dialogues on Alice Boner Symposium, January 2018, large public events and workshops in Zurich and Varanasi for a diverse audience. Harsha is co-editor of the publication series Alice Boner Dialogues, initiated in 2020. His experience includes facilitating exchange workshops for traditional artisans for the Crafts Council of India, Chennai and documenting craft traditions of Varanasi through short demonstrational videos by artisans. His interests also extend to art education, capacity building and integrating communities with museum spaces.

Harsha lives and works between Varanasi and Bangalore.

Developed in continuity with the Internationalisation@Home session at Ghent University on 12/11/2025, this event is organised in collaboration with Museum Rietberg (Zurich), Green Barbet Ltd (India), and the Visual & Digital Cultures Research Center, University of Antwerp. Funded by the Department of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University, and FWO (Odysseus Type II grant: “The Mosques of Kerala. Artistic Vocabularies in the Identity-Building of Muslim Communities”).

On 13 November 2025, the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies (GCSAS) and the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies (GCBS) are pleased to welcome Dr Keiki Nakayama (University of Leipzig) for a lecture entitled Resituating the Yogācārabhūmi Corpus: Potential Gandhāran Links and Sūtra-Grounded Practice.

Time & venue

• To attend remotely, please register through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipUpMvk6

ARTS, RELIGIONS AND LIVING TRADITIONS OF INDIA: FILM SCREENINGS AND CONVERSATION WITH HARSHA VINAY

Kunsthal Gent opens its doors to the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies (GCSAS) and to filmmaker and exhibition curator Harsha Vinay for an evening exploring the vibrant artistic, cultural, and religious landscapes of South Asia.

Through three short documentaries, Vinay guides us on a cinematic journey across India, portraying living traditions that shape communities and artistic expressions.

The screenings will be followed by an open discussion to delve into how heritage and religion intertwine in India, and how multimedia documentation can preserve and reinterpret fading cultural traditions within and beyond South Asia.

Time & venue

• When: Wednesday 12 November 2025, from 20:00 to 22:00 (8 pm – 10 pm CET)
• Where: Kunsthal Gent, Lange Steenstraat 14, 9000 Gent
• Contacts: letizia.trinco@ugent.be; sara.mondini@ugent.be; ev.declercq@ugent.be

Mirrors of Malabar
2019

Produced for the Museum Rietberg’s exhibition THE MIRROR – Our Reflected Self (2019) and subsequently screened internationally, Mirrors of Malabar document the making and ritual use of mirrors in worship and possession practices of coastal Kerala (southwestern India).

Short Films for Being Jain. Art and Culture of an Indian Religion
2022

Originally made for the Museum Rietberg’s exhibition Being Jain. Art and Culture of an Indian Religion (2022-2023), these short films explore key aspects of ritual and material culture within Jainism — including pilgrimage, asceticism, manuscript traditions, ritual death, and everyday lay practices — and have since been screened across the USA, Europe, and India.

Portrait of a Cloud. Mindscape of an Indian miniature artist
2025

This film documents the making of the contemporary Ragamala painting ‘Raga Megha’, highlighting the intricacies and nuances of this refined art form. Interwoven with the creative process is the story of Manish Soni, an artist from Rajasthan who began painting miniatures at the age of 21. The film was produced for the Museum Rietberg’s exhibition Ragamala. Pictures for all the senses (2025), which recently concluded.

Guest speaker’s bio

Harsha Vinay is the Founder Director of Green Barbet Ltd, India, with over ten years’ experience in curating exhibitions for international museums, cultural programming, administering an artist residency, production of research publications and documentary films.

Harsha holds an MA from the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a BFA in Painting from College of Fine Art, Bangalore. From 2013 to 2015 he worked at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore, as Assistant Curator in-charge of exhibitions, programmes and outreach. Prior to this he was the ‘Specialist Writer & Subject Expert’ on the curatorial team of the ICCR sponsored exhibition ‘The Body in Indian Art and Thought’, Bruxelles 2013. Here, Harsha was entrusted with research and collation of documentary films from the archives of the IGNCA and Sangeet Natak Akademi on the living traditions of India.

In 2016, Harsha Vinay moved to Varanasi as Director of the Alice Boner Institute, a residency space for academic and artistic research founded to keep alive the legacy of Swiss artist and scholar Padma Bhushan Dr. Alice Boner. Here he organised artist residencies, exhibitions, symposiums, and cultural events with a range of international institutions.

In 2018, Harsha started his own cultural enterprise in Bangalore – ‘Green Barbet: a company for art and culture in South Asia‘, which provides consultancy and advisory services for museums and cultural organisations within and outside India. Under the aegis of this company, Harsha Vinay has co-curated and collaborated on large exhibitions at Museum Rietberg, including ‘Alice Boner – Artist and Scholar’, 2015-18, ‘Mirror – The Reflected Self’, 2018-19, ‘Being Jain: Art and Culture of an Indian Religion’, 2022-23 and more recently ‘Ragamala – Pictures for all the Senses‘, 2024-25.

Harsha has organised numerous international programmes such as Dialogues on Alice Boner Symposium, January 2018, large public events and workshops in Zurich and Varanasi for a diverse audience. Harsha is co-editor of the publication series Alice Boner Dialogues, initiated in 2020. His experience includes facilitating exchange workshops for traditional artisans for the Crafts Council of India, Chennai and documenting craft traditions of Varanasi through short demonstrational videos by artisans. His interests also extend to art education, capacity building and integrating communities with museum spaces.

Harsha lives and works between Varanasi and Bangalore.

Developed in continuity with the Internationalisation@Home session at Ghent University on 12/11/2025, this event is organised in collaboration with Museum Rietberg (Zurich), Green Barbet Ltd (India), GBF Foundation for Cooperative Research on South Asian Art and Artists, and Kunsthal Gent. Funded by the Department of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University, and FWO (Odysseus Type II grant: “The Mosques of Kerala. Artistic Vocabularies in the Identity-Building of Muslim Communities”).

The Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies (GCSAS) is proud to announce a special lecture-event as part of the Internationalisation@Home programme of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy:

FROM MUSEUM TO FILM AND BACK: A JOURNEY THROUGH JAINISM, ITS ART AND LIVING TRADITIONS –
Film screening and discussion with curator-filmmaker Harsha Vinay

This event celebrates Jain studies at Ghent University with a screening of five short films by Harsha Vinay exploring key aspects of ritual and material culture within Jainism — pilgrimage, asceticism, manuscript traditions, ritual death, and everyday lay practices.

These films originally accompanied the exhibition Being Jain: Art and Culture of an Indian Religion (2022-24), a cross-disciplinary and multimedia collaboration between the Museum Rietberg, Switzerland, CERES, Germany, and Green Barbet Ltd., India.

Jainism is a millennia-old religion that originated in India and is now practiced worldwide, with Belgium home to the largest Jain community in continental Europe.

Faculty members and curator-filmmaker Harsha Vinay will explore innovative ways of experiencing, documenting, and mediating religious traditions and art—an exploration that builds on Ghent University’s long-standing tradition of Jain studies and the course Art and Archaeology of South Asia, now launching a brand-new module on Jain Art.

The screening and discussion will take place during the class hour of the course Art and Archaeology of South Asia and are open to everyone — no prior registration required.

• When: Wednesday 12 November 2025, from 12:30 to 14:30 (12:30-2:30 pm CET)
• Where: Auditorium H, T2, Campus Ufo, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Ghent
• Contacts: letizia.trinco@ugent.be; ev.declercq@ugent.be

Trailer

Guest speaker’s bio

Harsha Vinay is the Founder Director of Green Barbet Ltd, India, with over ten years’ experience in curating exhibitions for international museums, cultural programming, administering an artist residency, production of research publications and documentary films.

Harsha holds an MA from the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a BFA in Painting from College of Fine Art, Bangalore. From 2013 to 2015 he worked at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore, as Assistant Curator in-charge of exhibitions, programmes and outreach. Prior to this he was the ‘Specialist Writer & Subject Expert’ on the curatorial team of the ICCR sponsored exhibition ‘The Body in Indian Art and Thought’, Bruxelles 2013. Here, Harsha was entrusted with research and collation of documentary films from the archives of the IGNCA and Sangeet Natak Akademi on the living traditions of India.

In 2016, Harsha Vinay moved to Varanasi as Director of the Alice Boner Institute, a residency space for academic and artistic research founded to keep alive the legacy of Swiss artist and scholar Padma Bhushan Dr. Alice Boner. Here he organised artist residencies, exhibitions, symposiums, and cultural events with a range of international institutions.

In 2018, Harsha started his own cultural enterprise in Bangalore – ‘Green Barbet: a company for art and culture in South Asia‘, which provides consultancy and advisory services for museums and cultural organisations within and outside India. Under the aegis of this company, Harsha Vinay has co-curated and collaborated on large exhibitions at Museum Rietberg, including ‘Alice Boner – Artist and Scholar’, 2015-18, ‘Mirror – The Reflected Self’, 2018-19, ‘Being Jain: Art and Culture of an Indian Religion’, 2022-23 and more recently ‘Ragamala – Pictures for all the Senses‘, 2024-25.

Harsha has organised numerous international programmes such as Dialogues on Alice Boner Symposium, January 2018, large public events and workshops in Zurich and Varanasi for a diverse audience. Harsha is co-editor of the publication series Alice Boner Dialogues, initiated in 2020. His experience includes facilitating exchange workshops for traditional artisans for the Crafts Council of India, Chennai and documenting craft traditions of Varanasi through short demonstrational videos by artisans. His interests also extend to art education, capacity building and integrating communities with museum spaces.

Harsha lives and works between Varanasi and Bangalore.

This event is funded by the Department of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University, and organised in collaboration with the Museum Rietberg, Zurich, and Green Barbet Ltd, India.

Upcoming Lecture: The Figure of the Faqīr

• Date: October 29
• Time: 16:00
• Location: Faculty Board Room, Blandijn, Campus Boekentoren and online (click to register)
• Hosted by: Ghent Center for South Asia Studies

On 18 June 2025, the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies (GCSAS) and the Ghent Centre for Buddhist Studies (GCBS) will co-host a lecture by Dr Stefan Baums (University of Munich) titled “Gāndhārī Manuscripts and Inscriptions: Maintaining and Analyzing a Comprehensive Corpus”.

This event is part of The Gandhāra Corpora Project Lecture Series. All are welcome: The Gandhāra Corpora Lecture Series is in-person and hybrid online.

Time & venue

• To attend remotely, please register through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipUpMvk6

Abstract

Gandhāra is known not only for its unique material culture, representing a confluence of Hellenistic and South Asian elements, but also for the wealth of ancient inscriptions and manuscripts in the local Gāndhārī language and Kharoṣṭhī script that it produced and preserved for us. Many of the inscriptions are from Buddhist contexts, including a large number of donative records, and some contain valuable historical information about the population and rulers of Gandhāra through history. Most ancient manuscripts from Gandhāra have come to light only in the last thirty years, and are the subject of intense ongoing research. They are the oldest Buddhist and the oldest South Asian manuscripts preserved, and very close to the beginning of written literature in South Asia. Beyond Gandhāra itself, Gāndharī manuscripts and inscriptions were produced far into the Indian subcontinent, up to Bamiyan in the west, in the kingdoms of Khotan, Krorayina, and Kucha along the Silk Roads, and among expatriate Buddhist communities in China. The Gāndhārī documentary corpus thus tells the story of the export of a writing culture, of its texts, and of the ideas that they conveyed across large parts of Asia, and is of unique interest for the historiography of Buddhism and Asian civilization. It is also a very diverse corpus, produced over more than five hundred years, comprising many different document types, and written in a broad range of scribal hands, orthographies, and dialects ranging from Middle Indian to Sanskrit. Beginning in 2002, Andrew Glass and the present speaker have been compiling a text-image corpus of all Gāndhārī documents on the website Gandhari.org, currently numbering 2,858 items and continually updated. In addition to presenting the documents in both their material and textual aspects, they catalog and analyze them in various ways, including the a dictionary of the Gāndhārī language, currently numbering 10,125 articles and firmly establishing Gāndhārī as one of the major languages of Buddhism and modern Buddhist scholarship. This lecture will introduce the corpus of Gāndhārī documents from Gandhāra and beyond, discuss the particular challenges that their study individually and as a whole presents, the solutions that have been adopted, and some discoveries made along the way.

Bio

Stefan Baums teaches at the Institute for Indology and Tibetology of the University of Munich and serves as lead researcher of the Buddhist Manuscripts from Gandhāra project at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Before joining the University of Munich, he held positions at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Washington, the University of California, Berkeley, and Leiden University. His research interests include Buddhist philology and epigraphy, classical Sanskrit court literature, the development of Buddhist hermeneutics, and the description of Gāndhārī language and literature. His current work focuses on the decipherment and edition of four Gāndhārī manuscripts containing commentaries on early Buddhist verses and the Saṃgītisūtra and a study of the historical connections and exegetical principles of this group of texts. He is editor of the Dictionary of Gāndhārī, co-editor of the Gandhāran Buddhist Texts series, academic lead of the Research Environment for Ancient Documents (READ) software development project, and epigraphist for the Italian Archeological Mission in Pakistan.

We are delighted to share that three researchers will be joining the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies at the Department of Languages and Cultures in the fall having been awarded prestigious FWO Junior and Senior Postdoctoral Fellowships in the 2025 competition.

Dr. Heleen De Jonckheere has received a senior postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Professor Eva De Clercq. Dr Kikee Bhutia and Dr. Xiaoming Hou have both received junior postdoctoral fellowships under the supervision of Professor Charles DiSimone. Congratulations to Dr. De Jonkheere, Dr. Bhutia, and Dr. Hou! We are excited to welcome them into our research group in the Fall.

Dr. De Jonckheere joins us from SOAS London with the project: Apabhraṃśa at the Turning Point of the Tenth Century in Indian Literary History

This project will study the literary expression and socio-aesthetic role of Apabhramsha within the multilingual literary landscape of 10^th-century Malkhed, South India. This period marks a turning point in the history of Apabhramsha and of Indian literature. Apabhramsha literature was at its height with the writing of the Jain author Puṣpadanta (10^th c.), but after the sacking of Malkhed in 972 CE, it disappeared from South India, confining writing in the classical triad of languages (Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Apabhramsha) to North-India. Although scholars recognise the significance of this moment and of Puṣpadanta’s poetic excellence, his works or the role of Apabhramsha as a literary idiom have not been studied seriously. This project will address this gap by (1) characterising the socio-aesthetic qualities of Puṣpadanta’s Apabhramsha; (2) comparing these with those of other literary languages prevalent in 10th-century Malkhed; (3) analysing the religio-political complex at that time and its potential impact on Apabhramsha’s South-Indian demise; and (4) assessing the legacy of Puṣpadanta in North-India. I will apply methods of classical and digital philology on poetic texts, inscriptions, and manuscript colophons to achieve this. The project’s results will contribute to our understanding of the shift to the vernacular in South India, and of the influence of Apabhramsha on India’s literary history, stimulating new research on this understudied language.

Dr. Bhutia joins us from the University of Tartu with the project: Local Deities, Natural Disaster, and Ritual Waste in Vernacular Buddhist Practices in the Himalayas

This project examines the intersection of local religious practices, environmental policies, and waste management in Sikkim, with a particular emphasis on the influence of Buddhist rituals and beliefs on the community’s approach to sustainability. Despite its relatively small geographic size, Sikkim has emerged as a leader in environmental initiatives, including the prohibition of plastic and the promotion of eco-friendly practices. However, traditional rituals, such as the tying of prayer flags and the use of synthetic materials in religious offerings, pose significant challenges to environmental conservation. This research investigates the roles of local deities, vernacular Buddhist practices, and monastic institutions in waste management, analyzing how religious concepts are integrated into environmental policies. Utilizing ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, this study will explore how communities navigate the complexities of modernization and tradition, thereby contributing to academic discussions on waste, religion, and sustainability in the Himalayas. The project aims to produce scholarly articles, presentations, and public outreach materials, thereby fostering both academic and social engagement.

Dr. Hou joins us from UC Berkeley with the project: Visualizing Doctrine: A Study of Exegetical Diagrams in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (8^th–10^th Centuries)

This research project investigates the technical and pedagogical practices of medieval Chinese Buddhism by focusing on exegetical diagrams preserved in Dunhuang from the 8th to 10th centuries. Known both as fenmen tu 分門圖 (“diagram of gate-division”) and kewen 科文 (“text of analytical division”), these diagrams exemplify the liminal nature of this unique genre, which bridges the boundaries between image and text. Flourishing in medieval China and persisting into modern Buddhist practice, these diagrams provide critical insights into the epistemological foundations of Chinese Buddhist scholasticism. The study addresses three key questions: (1) What are the defining features and functions of these diagrams, and how do they facilitate knowledge organization? (2) How were they produced, transmitted, and utilized in their manuscript contexts, and what do these practices reveal about their pedagogical roles? (3) What do these diagrams disclose about the social and institutional networks of their producers and users? The project also situates Buddhist exegetical diagrams within the broader Chinese tu 圖 tradition, comparing them with diagrams from non-Buddhist traditions to analyze their divergences as scholastic tools. By exploring these diagrams as technical devices for knowledge transmission, this research shifts scholarly focus from doctrinal content to the technical savoir-faire underpinning intellectual traditions.

Time & venue

• To attend remotely, please register through this Google Form: https://forms.gle/TwffQCPuVipUpMvk6