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Ancient Figurines: Making Identities, Controlling Bodies was an installation at the Badé Museum of Biblical Archaeology, Berkeley, California from June – Sept, 2015. Format: photographic / mixed-media. Curator: Doug Bailey (San Francisco State University). Support from San Francisco State University’s Office of Research and Sponsored Programs to Professor Bailey.

People have made small human sculptures since the Upper Palaeolithic 35,000 years ago. Thousands of figurines were made during the East European Neolithic period (6500-3500 BC). Traditional treatments of figurines seek objectivity and precise illustration. Archaeologist Doug Bailey’s images provoke new thoughts about figurines and about the ways that past peoples defined their identities.

Standard interpretation follows Marija Gimbutas’ suggestions of Mother Goddess fertility cults. More nuanced research argues that figurines had many different prehistoric functions and meanings: idols, toys, teaching devices, totems, portraits. Their lasting cultural importance may be the way that all small human figures sub-consciously shape our definition of our identities. Bailey’s photographs probe the consequences of making manifest the human form and then (literally) manipulating it: holding, covering, muting, controlling. When that body is female, then deeper levels of significance come into play.

In the exhibit cases are modern anthropomorphic objects, like Barbie, in close juxtaposition with ancient ones. Are they the same things? Do they work in the same way? The prehistoric objects, the photographs of them, and the juxtapositions of modern and ancient objects, disrupt the easy ways we thought we understood identity and representations of the human form, ancient and modern.

There are no easy answers to the simple question, “What do these object’s mean?”.  The figurines and the photographs are themselves questions. The aim? To interrogate conceptions of who we are, what we look like, and how others attempt to control and silence us.

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