Exhibits

After Hours: Dante – Heaven and Hell at Dante Season 2021

February 14, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

On November 13, 2021, the collaborative effort behind Dante in Oxford hosted the “After Hours” event. The event was described as follows:

“An exciting ‘after hours’ programme of activities at the Ashmolean Museum showcasing the diverse range of researchers and performers who are connected to Dante.

“Oxford will be alive with opportunities to celebrate Dante in 2021 — exactly 700 years since the great poet’s death. Best known for his astonishing Divine Comedy — a three-stage epic poem, narrating a journey through the afterlife from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven, with all of human history, knowledge, love, and life encountered on the way — Dante was an advisor to princes, a political exile, and a revolutionary poet.” —TORCH (retrieved February 13, 2022)

One of the “performers” at this event was a robotic poet named Ai-da; view our post about her poetry here.

More information about the “After Hours” event and its programming (which included live performances and other exhibits) can be found here.

Other Dante in Oxford posts can be found here.

Dante Season at Oxford (2021)

February 7, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

“Oxford will be alive with opportunities to celebrate Dante in 2021 — exactly 700 years since the great poet’s death.

“Dante in Oxford 2021 will explore the work and its many and rich afterlives, by exploring new forms of public engagement with research, with artistic practice, and with political and cultural history. We will draw on the strength of Oxford’s research community to curate a wide-reaching cultural festival with a range of public events, including live in-person and online programming.

“We are collaborating with important partners across and beyond the university, including the Oxford Dante Society, the Ashmolean Museum, and other national and international partners. Bringing together scholars and translators, international artists, dancers, theatre-makers, and musicians, community groups, and schools, our ambition is both to disseminate and showcase Oxford’s world-leading research, and to experiment with new forms of critically informed public engagement – all in celebration of Dante’s life and the many and complex contexts in which his work lives on, through both research and reinvention in contemporary cultures across the world.” [. . .] —TORCH (retrieved February 7, 2022)

The complete Dante Season program can be found here.

Relatedly, find other Dante in Oxford 2021 events and posts here.

Inferno Exhibition at Lisbon, Portugal (2021)

January 5, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“As a part of the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), this exhibition will present two drawings on parchment by Sandro Botticelli referring to the Divine Comedy’s Inferno, alongside two manuscripts by Jacopo della Lana and Boccaccio, courtesy of the Vatican Library.

“The exhibition will also feature a copy of Dante’s manuscript which once belonged to Frei Manuel do Cenáculo, currently property of the Portuguese National Library, works from the Calouste Gulbenkian’s collection and works by Rui Chafes which refer to Dante’s Inferno.” —Visit Lisboa

The 2021 exhibition was hosted by the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. See their website here.

Dante 700 Mural and Art Exhibit in Addis Abeba (2021)

November 19, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“The mural occupies an area of over 170 square meters and is divided into three connected sections in which Italian and Ethiopian artists interpret, in a modern key, the Supreme Poet and his life with the works Dante The Ethiopian (group ‘Addis Street Art’), The Divine Technic (Nicola Varesco), and Inside (Van Orton Design – Marco and Stefano Schiavon).

[. . .]

“The project, promoted with the patronage and support of the National Committee for the celebrations of the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death, is the result of the work of numerous illustrators, street artists, graphic designers, comic and graphic novel authors, very different from each other in terms of style (which ranges from tempera painting and geometric design to the use of 3D software), and in the approach to the reinterpretation of Dante’s iconography, but all of great impact.” [. . .] —Italiana

Along with Dante’s 700th anniversary, this event commemorates the XXI week of the Italian Language in the world. Learn more through the Italian Cultural Institute of Addis Abeba, linked here.

Learn more about the exhibit here.

“Dante in Greece” Conference (Athens, 2021)

October 27, 2021 By Hannah Raisner, FSU '25

“The ‘Dante and Greece‘ International Conference is part of the vast programme of Dante celebrations put in place to mark the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of the Supreme Poet. This initiative is also inspired by the bicentenary of Greek independence (1821-2021) and promoted by the Italian Philhellenic Society and by other Italian, Greek and Cypriot institutions.

“One of the stages of the conference will be at the Italian Cultural Institute of Athens on 30 September. The conference will discuss the extraordinary influence that Dante has exerted and indeed still continues to exert on Greek and Cypriot literature, from Kavafis to Kazantzakis, from Sikelianòs to Prevelakis. Italian and international scholars will be taking part.

“At 8 pm Dante Night will begin, with a screening of ‘L’inferno di Dante‘, a silent film by Bertolini, de Liguori and Padovan (1911). The film will be accompanied by a musical performance featuring saxophone and live electronics by Marco Castelli, who composed the arrangements.

“The preview of the exhibition ‘Dante: l’immaginazione delle immagini‘ (Dante: The Imagination of Images) will follow. The Divine Comedy today: an artistic dialogue between Greek and Italian painters 700 years after the Poet’s death. The exhibition is curated by Konstantinos Moussas. —Italiana

For more information on the Convegno: Dante e la Grecia, see here.

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