The exhibition "Senusret III, a Legendary Pharaoh” is an event for several reasons. It is the first time that the Lille Palais des Beaux-Arts has organised a major exhibition on Egypt. It has also been produced in close cooperation with the Louvre Museum, which holds one of the largest collections of Ancient Egyptian objects after the Cairo Museum.
An object of fascination for researchers, archaeologists, as well as the general public, the Egyptian civilization has never stopped revealing the extent of its riches, nor the evocative power of its myths. A genuine golden age of this civilization has emerged from the choice of around 300 objects presented here, which retrace the reign of Senusret III (also known as Sésostris III), great builder and reformer of Egypt during the Middle Kingdom.
The exhibition’s strength lies in the comparison of spectacular objects but also of miniature ones. Together they build the portrait of a monarch and his court, but also of the civil society, from the elite to the peasants, in their work and in their daily lives. Shaped by this world of workers, craftsmen, soldiers, and scribes, the legend of Senusret III has endured and reached us today, retracing the history of a man who posterity has made into a demigod.
As a prelude to the exhibition, the museum’s atrium will be showing contemporary works of art by Antony Gormley and Wolfgang Laib. The title, “Journey after Life,” directly refers to the Egyptian beliefs in a life after death, and to the rites and the artistic works that represented a dialogue between the world of the living and that of the dead. Whether in the sculptures with a human figure by Antony Gormley or in Wolfgang Laib’s work on natural substances, such as beeswax or rice, both pose, in a personal manner, the existential questions about passing from the living to the dead, and the soul’s immortality.
The photographic section, “Revealing Egypt : 19th Century Archaeology and Photographs,” bears witness to the extraordinary adventure of 19th century archaeological digs. Commonplace today, at that time taking a picture was still a pioneering act. These photographs have nevertheless fixed in time and place a universal memory, a vision of Ancient Egypt that has never ceased to haunt us, and which this Egyptian “season” reveals and magnifies.
The exhibition is on view from 9 October to 25 January, 2015.
Source: Palais des Beaux-arts de Lille [October 15, 2014]