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Curatorial Statement: Bes Jar, 664–332 B.C.E. Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 07.447.478. 

for “The African Archive Beyond Colonization” taught by Denise Lim in partnership with the Brooklyn Museum.

 

In curating the Bes Jar 07.447.478, I had to consider it was not possible to handle the object which prevented an understanding of its weight, texture, and overall feel, as well as the ability to complete and present a 3D model. In response to this limitation, the curation sought to offer the visitor the opportunity to imagine what it would be like to hold, use and be with this object. As such, I did not want the object to remain a passive recipient of information, in which it has been ascribed a specific meaning and function or geographical and chronological character.

 

With this in mind, I turned towards theories and methodologies from anthropology, particularly Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT)[1]. ANT is a way to give more agency to the Bes Jar, considering it as an “actant” within a larger “network” where hierarchies between object, ideas, people and interfaces are reexamined and flattened. For example, considering the Bes Jar as an actant helps to think about how researchers both inform and are formed by the object itself, and how deemed experts, rather than being solely an authoritative voice, equally depend upon these objects to construct their role as experts. And, for instance, how the Bes Jar exists not only in its material form but in academic papers, conferences, digital formats, and photographs, and how these actants, in themselves, interact within a larger network.

 

This idea is illustrated through the collage composed of diverse representations, drawings, essay titles, and analyses of Bes Jars. It is centered with a screenshot of the only instance the Jar is directly illustrated in academic literature, with a backdrop of a picture from a burial ground where the object may have been looted. I pushed this idea by formatting the bibliography to a quasi-illegible font size, questioning the politics of citation, and the dependency experts have on citations to further entrench their discipline, knowledge, authority, recognition and their “truthfulness”. Although the authors cited informed this curation and presentation, I equally wanted to keep the object and its materiality in central focus.

 

This brings to another aspect of the curation, the removal of this object from a tomb, whose last function was to protect its owner in the afterlife. The excavator commissioned for this work by the Brooklyn Museum, Henri De Morgan, was a character I wanted to include in the curation, both by pointing out how he died suddenly after the last of his two exhibitions to Egypt, and how his field notes, written in the frenzy of his tomb raiding, left open questions about the exact provenance of the object. Critically fabulating[2] that the Bes Jar had cursed De Morgan and led to his sudden death, was a step to allow a visitor to imagine the power of such an object and equally explore the potential questions this type of fabulation might raise. Finally, I wanted to highlight a phrase from his reports, where his desire to label ancient Egyptians as white rather than people of color showed an inherent bias in his research methodology, and one very much conform to his contemporaries[3].

 

This in turn, was an aspect of the Bes Jar I wanted to point out. Bes Jars have been found in Nubia, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, all the way to Iran. The iconography has traveled further, all the way to the Greek and Roman Empires. Questioning colonially inherited nation state boundaries was important here, and the map purposefully did not have such borders, featuring only topological information.

 

I also wanted to explore why this iconography traveled through such an extended period of time and space. In asking this question I discovered more about Bes, and the “lovely ugly”[4] figure the demon/god represents. I thought this was very much reflected in the expression the Jar carries, in that there is something both playful, gruesome, and caring about the little jar. As such, I wanted to show how the Brooklyn Museum collection contains a great number of other representations of Bes and how these have changed through time and location.

 

The last picture of the Bes Jar on the webpage is a commentary on how the digital format and its two-dimensional nature easily simplifies and obscures the different perspectives of a three-dimensional object – indeed, the camera angle is other than what a visitor to the displayed object would usually linger on. The gif itself also zooms onto the Bes Jar’s face, giving it a larger and larger presence, until it completely fills the frame, a final nod to the agency of the Jar.

 

The first part of the webpage reflects this slow buildup, where the object is not immediately shown, but rather the focus is on its materiality and birthplace, the Nile. Here, I found it essential to situate how the clay was collected and how this corresponded to time periods in Ancient Egypt. The first animated gif of different parts of the Bes Jar, was to initially not show the object to a visitor, but rather parts of it through images taken at different times by both the museum and me, an illustration of how to the object both is and isn’t a composition of different interpretive actions. The Bes Jar is later revealed fully, although still partly covered by text in a series of four black and white images of its front, back, profile and top, first taken by the Brooklyn Museum during a categorization effort. These images were purposefully arranged and added with text to resemble mug shots, pointing out that the Bes Jar remains displaced, held prisoner in the museum.

 

Finally, this curation is accessible and interactive, in both language, images chosen, information provided, and cues from the Bes Jar, attempting to engage and provoke the diversity of audiences who visit the Brooklyn Museum.

 

[1] Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, 2023.

[2] Hartman, Sadiya. Wayward lives, Beautiful Experiments Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W. W. Northon & Company, 2023.

[3] De Morgan, Henry. “Étude Sur l’Égypte Primitive.” Revue de l’Ecole d’Anthropologie de Paris 19 (1909): 128–281.

 

[4] Mitchell, Robbie. “Bes, the Odd God: Egypt’s Nubian Party Boy.” Historic Mysteries (blog), November 17, 2023. https://www.historicmysteries.com/archaeology/bes/37755/.