Archive for October, 2007

Afghan Antiquity

Thursday, October 18th, 2007

By ANN MARLOWE

TURIN, Italy — There’s a general, and luckily false, belief that the years of war have wiped out Afghanistan’s artistic heritage. Many of the greatest objects from the Kabul Museum survived the years of war and are part of “I Tesori Ritrovati,” a revelatory show now in Turin.

Many of the 220 items in this exhibit were hidden for decades in the vaults of the Presidential Palace in Kabul, while others are recent finds; it’s highly unlikely you have seen any of them before. The current show began its tour in December at Paris’s Musee Guimet, which also lent a few objects to the show, and will travel to Bonn, Amsterdam and the U.S. before returning to exhibition in Kabul for the first time in some thirty years.

In Turin, you enter the exhibit by descending from the street level to the remains of the city’s Roman theater. The installation in a series of relatively small rooms in the vaulted brick basement of the 1899 Manica Nuovo di Palazzo Royale, allows for an intimate experience of the mainly small-scale art. (more…)