VIDEO GAME NARRATIVES IN EXHIBIT DESIGN: THE THESIS OF ANDREY MINTCHEV

Final Project Reflections | Caitlin McCurdy

---

The number of students who choose to do the thesis stream of the MMSt program is considerably smaller than those who choose the exhibition project route. One of these students is Andrey Mintchev, and he very kindly took the time to answer some of my questions about his path to the thesis stream.

His decision to pursue a thesis occurred after taking Velian Pandeliev’s course INF2164H: UX Research and Design for Video Games. He described the class as a study of the positive impact that UX-forward thinking has on elements such as level design and gameplay in video games. He then thought to himself, “Is anyone doing this in museum studies? How awesome would it be if museums felt like videogames?” As he discussed this idea with Prof. Pandeliev and continued learning more about human-computer interactive (HCI) sciences and their research methods, he realized that there wasn’t a particular class on this topic, and that his new conception of an amalgamation of gaming and museology would be best realized in a thesis. 

Courtesy of Andrey Mintchev.

Andrey has a very interesting story about how he came to meet his thesis supervisor, Tony Tang:

“I was waiting for the light to go green on Saint George and Bloor, when I overheard a conversation between two people, who were discussing something about AR. The one guy responded with a “I don’t know Tony, but that sounds interesting” and I immediately assumed that it was Tony Tang. I sheepishly interrupted with a “hi, sorry, but are you Tony Tang? I want to talk to you about turning museums into a VR world”, to which he pleasantly offered up his email.

Andrey then fulfilled his research methods course requirement with a reading course overseen by Prof. Tang, where he was able to make connections between HCI and museology and began to work out his ideas for his thesis. Andrey’s final thesis proposal was the fourth or fifth iteration of his initial idea, and it was at this point that he approached Costis Dallas about being his second reader.

When I asked Andrey for the elevator pitch for the current iteration of his thesis, he was kind enough to give me the short elevator ride pitch, the slightly longer elevator ride pitch, and the elevator ride to the penthouse pitch. Here’s what he said:

“My thesis is on applying videogame level design and narrative design to exhibit design. What I’ve done is record 14 hours of gameplay between five games that boast a compelling narrative, recorded every instance where the story was being conveyed and what the level in that moment looked like, and then produced 598 lines of code to synthesize each screenshot into qualitative data. The idea is to use my synthesized data to identify the best practices for level design and narrative design and apply them to the reinterpretation of an existing museum exhibit. The final deliverable should produce a compelling exhibit that improves on the existing one.”

Courtesy of Andrey Mintchev

This all sounds very fascinating to me, as someone doing an almost entirely theoretical thesis based in historical research and epistemological philosophizing. I’m excited to see the final product of Andrey’s work, I think his research could definitely shed light on how video game practices could innovate our approaches to exhibit design.

Courtesy of Andrey Mintchev

I asked Andrey to give one tip for prospective students considering the thesis stream, and his answer was very insightful.

“There is no right or wrong stream at our school, but if you’ve got this awesome idea, I promise you that our faculty will do everything it can to help [you] walk out of this program with a publication that you’ll be proud of.”

Ultimately, if you have an idea you can’t get out of your head that you’ve brought into the program with you, you can make the thesis stream work for you, and you control the subject, process, and end result of your work, with insight along the way from your very knowledgeable supervisor(s). Andrey also pointed out that this control is fairly unique to the thesis stream, as the final exhibition project is subject to variables like the makeup of your student group and the flexibility of your industry partner. To give Andrey the last word, “Real-talk, it’s the most academically satisfying thing you can do if you hate group work.”

PARTYING WITH DIONYSUS: CELEBRATION, FEMININITY, TEXTILES

Object of the Week | Caitlin McCurdy

---

Earlier this year, the Textile Museum of Canada was gearing up for a new exhibition of fibre artist Anna Torma’s works, titled Permanent Dangers. Torma uses techniques like embroidery, felting, photo transfer, collage, and quilting to weave narratives of popular culture, mythology, traditional Hungarian textiles, and her own personal stories of family, immigration, and joy. In an effort to highlight some objects made in this century, I’d like to discuss one of Anna Torma’s incredible pieces, inspired by the Greek god Dionysus, aptly titled Dionysia. This artwork brings together elements of mythology, traditionally “feminine” crafts, and nudity into a rich tapestry of life and celebration. I’m intrigued by this use of ancient myth in contemporary art, and it serves as my entry point into engaging with her work.

Dionysia, Anna Torma (2020) | Source

Textile art has always walked a line between craft and the artworld. The common understanding of why this is the case is that sewing, embroidery, and the like were considered “women’s work,” kept in the realm of the home and recreation, not for the sophisticated art connoisseur. Torma herself was introduced to embroidery and sewing by her mother and grandmother who taught her while she was growing up in Hungary. Her work often explores these ideas of fixed femininity and feminine decorum in order to destabilize them, which in turn elevates her “craft-based creative practices” in the eyes of some art critics.

In Dionysia, Torma draws inspiration from elements of Greek mythology. Dionysus served a number of purposes within the Greek pantheon. He was the masked god, the effeminate god, the “great liberator through wine," and later the patron of the arts. A festival held in his name, Great Dionysia, was a weeks long festival of renewal involving wine, the performance of plays, and “overall lechery.” The air of festivity and celebration is reflective in the brightness and action within Dionysia, in which nudity is just a piece of the celebration.

Detail of Dionysia | Source

Femininity, female sensuality, and nudity often play a role in Torma’s works. In Dionysia, they work as a part of celebration of life as inspired by the myth of Dionysus, particularly its more lecherous elements. Nudity is only one of several elements that can bring you in to follow the rich narrative taking place within Torma’s embroidered storytelling. In an article for White Hot Magazine, James D. Campbell discusses the multiple entry points Torma’s works provides. He describes engaging with her work as “non-hierarchical entry and exit points in an acentered and labyrinthine diaspora,” using the specific term Rhizomatic Wanderlust. This description resonated with me, as you can choose any corner of the tapestry to engage with and be brought into a narrative of femininity, domesticity, or sensuality and move through the piece in any direction you choose. Then choose a new spot and begin the whole process again.

Entry Points into Torma's work | Source

In this particular corner of Torma’s piece, nudity is interspersed with elements invoking the changing of seasons. Great Dionysia was held in March, a festival of renewal at the onset of a new spring. As a god also associated with rebirth, the influence of Dionysus is also implicit in the scenes of greenery and flowers surrounding a snowman. This whimsical play of seasons, and the humour with which the nudity is presented influences the overall air of celebration that permeates the piece and allows viewers to string together a narrative as they engage with its specific elements.

Now, my specialty is not contemporary art nor art theory and my reading of this piece is based solely on my own feelings and interpretation based on initial engagement with the piece. But I think that is something that Torma’s work welcomes as each piece is so visually busy it has something for everyone to connect to initially. The use of techniques traditionally not associated with the fine arts world also alludes to this accessibility.

In researching this article, I also learned more about the Textile Museum and its dedication to exploring the world through textile arts. Although the museum is closed right now due to COVID-19 lockdowns, I look forward to a time when I can visit and see how my impression of Dionysia changes. I long to engage with Dionysia in person and see how this process differs from simply zooming in and out of the pictures available on the Textile Museum’s website. I’d love to engage with the tactile elements of the piece, how the stitching changes the narrative, or the fabric emphasizes certain portions of the story it is telling.

Source

ACT, IDENTITY, AND AN ANCIENT GREEK VASE

Object of the Week | Caitlin McCurdy

---

In all my articles for this column, I have shied away from talking about the Greeks and their plethora of erotic and nude artifacts that fill museum’s collections. I find their thousands years history rather daunting to tackle, and the complex homosocial, inter-generational sexual relationships between men that are equally well-documented even more so. But we’re opening that can of worms now, so let’s discuss this little pocket of history through this week’s object: an amphora from the British Museum’s collection, originally from Athens of Archaic Greece, circa 540 BCE.

Front side of an Archaic Greek Amphora (c) The Trustees of the British Museum | Source

Amphorai were typically used for the storage and transport of wine and food. To create black-figure pottery, a slip that turned black during firing was applied to the pottery in the shape of figures and ornamental motifs.

I first came across this artifact in a book called A Little Gay History by R.B. Parkinson. It’s a cute, quick look at same-sex desire across history, and an interesting read to see how this desire has manifested itself in material culture across time and civilizations. Parkinson discusses the culturally approved intimacy of boys & men in ancient Greece, how they were structured by age, and the inclusion of these relationships in scenes depicted on pottery.

Cover of R. B. Parkinson's Book. Courtesy of Caitlin McCurdy

Parkinson works as an Egyptology professor at Oxford University and is a former curator of the British Museum’s Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan. He has written on the study of LGBT histories and ways in which to extend this historiography into ancient civilizations which carried different signifiers, gender roles, and meanings from our own. In an essay about his process for writing this book, he emphasized the potential social impact of engaging in the historiographic work. In other essays of his, he also describes the importance of not overextending modern labels and identities when studying behaviours and acts that feel familiar to our current moment, as in their original context they may have served a different purpose. As he states himself, “such historical interpretation is not a purely ‘academic’ matter, and research on such topics has to be irrefutably accurate or it risks a backward step.”

In my personal statement for admission to this program, I wrote that reaching into the past to find evidence of yourself can help legitimize your identity to a present that is looking for a reason to dismiss you. Museum exhibitions can help in this process, and I have had emotional moments in LGBT-themed exhibitions when confronted with effective framing of these artifacts. But it has to be done responsibly.

The treatment of these artifacts by the museums that hold them play an important part in how the public views the artifacts, and the people who created them. By framing the amphora within a context of same sex desire, questions of similarities between today's gay community and the pederastic relationships of ancient Greece come to mind.

Close Up on the British Museum Amphora. (c) The Trustees of the British Museum. Source.

The homosocial relationships between men in ancient Greece are often discussed as being early representations of gay relationships, and having the amphora included in exhibitions about LGBT identities and histories adopts this perspective. Parkinson also frames the amphora as representative in this way. As depicted in this vase, bearded men are courting younger athletic youth, reflecting how these pederastic relationships served a function unique to ancient Greece. When I asked my friend & resident ancient Greece expert Sydney Rodrigues about this phenomenon, she had the following to say:

But when are representations of same sex desires ever a quick conversation?

As my parasocial dream professor Dr. Parkinson wrote, “I myself am not a historian of sexuality, but simply a gay Egyptologist who specialises in Middle Kingdom literature from around 1900–1650 BC.” I currently don’t think of myself as a historian of sexuality, but I think that’s slowly changing as more and more of my thesis is looking into queer theory and applying it to museums and Egyptology. But I am a gay Egyptologist, and the instinct to look at ancient Egypt and find myself there has been present since my 101 essay on Women in Egypt.

I focus on erotic artifacts because I am fascinated by what they reveal about humanity. The two things that are consistent across all cultures, from ancient Greece and Egypt into Medieval Europe, are death and sex. And we know about death: the funerary cult of Egypt, the Catholic rites of 15th century England. But death is also stagnant, it remains buried and preserved, waiting to be uncovered. Sex is elusive, a set of actions rarely depicted in material culture, and even more difficult to preserve through centuries of Western society creating taboos around discussion of such material.

(c) The Trustees of the British Museum. Source.

This amphora is a glimpse into the life of ancient Greeks, both in its use to serve wine and its depictions of a moment of life — relationships between men. Currently, the online collections of the British Museum list the amphora as not on display, but it does have an extensive exhibition history. In 2018–2019 it was included in the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition titled Desire, love and identity: exploring LGBTQ identities. A decade earlier, in 2007–2008, the amphora was part of an exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London called Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquities to Now. 

I am intrigued by the moment when a gay man wanders into these exhibitions and peers into a display case to see this amphora. Does he see himself reflected back at him? Or is the art style too foreign, the cultural context too different from his own? Do the years of colonial interference alter his understanding of the artifact? This phenomenon is described by Elizabeth Freeman as erotohistoriography, a queer theory concept which is currently taking up a lot of real estate in my brain, and it has huge applicability for museums. Maybe by the time I’m finished this program I’ll have some answers to these questions. But more likely, I’ll continue to study the past, and look for myself there. 

EDGING ON PORNOGRAPHY: NUDE DAGUERREOTYPES IN THE GETTY COLLECTION

Object of the Week | Caitlin McCurdy

---

Rear of a Daguerreotype advertising portraits and lessons. Source

With the advent of any new artistic technology, from the earliest, crudest sculptures of early mankind, to painting or photography, one of the first things to be depicted seems to be the nude form of women. The ancient Greeks did it, 15th century painters like Sandro Botticelli did it, and with the advent of Daguerreotypes by Francois Daguerre in 1839, a technology was made available that allowed a larger audience to produce and distribute highly sophisticated reproductions of the female form. Each Daguerreotype was a unique image on a silvered copper plate, and portrait studios quickly became commercial enterprises. This inflation of the portrait market allowed a second market to develop for portraits of a more scandalous nature.

This week’s Object of the Week is a collection of nude Daguerreotypes from the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The museum has over 2000 Daguerreotypes, but the female nudes reveal a history of Paris’ 19th century porn market, and where lines were being delineated between artistic representation and pornography. In researching for this article, I found that often Daguerreotypes were being defined between this line of what 19th century morality would allow and what it deemed too vulgar for the masses.


Example of a more demure nude. Source

Daguerreotypes did not render the colour of the subjects they captured, so many were coloured by hand. The vast majority of Daguerreotype studio owners were men, so all examples of nudes in this article were taken by men. The first daguerreotype highlighted in this article, seen above, depicts a woman in a transparent gown, standing against a mirror. Her hands, up in her hair braiding, conceal her breasts from view. This photo suggests a spontaneous glimpse into a private moment, a teasing of nudity rather than the more provocative examples to come.

The next example is described in the Getty collection as a study of a woman resting on a divan in profile. This appears to be the generally accepted “artist’s study” of female nudity, rather than outright pornography. Her pose mimics the stance of ancient marble statues, the nude of a different era.


An "Artist's Study". Source

The images tend to begin being described as pornographic when there is more than one subject in the frame. The following, titled Two Women Embracing is described as “posturing teetered between artist’s study and pornography”. The poses appear to be more for the pleasure of the observer, positioned to be revealed to the camera. It feels voyeuristic, looking in at an intimate spontaneous moment between lovers. However, knowing that the process behind producing a Daguerreotype could take several minutes, the models likely had to hold this pose for an unnatural amount of time while the photo was being taken.


Two Women Embracing. Source.

The question I keep returning to in my study of nudity within museum collections is when does the female body switch from an artistic study of form to pornography. My first, instinctual answer is that this switch occurred with the emergence of photographic representation of contemporary women, as they may appear more relevant and scandalizing to contemporary museum audiences than a centuries old painting or sculpture. The reality, however, is likely more complex than my answer. There are examples of paintings that pushed this distinction too far, crossing the line between artistic appreciation of form into more explicitly erotic depictions. But the availability of technologies like the Daguerreotype allowed a greater number of people to create reproductions of nudity.


Voyeurism and the Nude. Source

These Daguerreotypes were produced and sold out of Paris’ underground porn market, a reaction against crackdowns on a perceived morality crisis. In the example above, Two Nudes in Boudoir Studio Setting, the viewer is again intruding on a fabricated private moment. The shape of the frame also suggests an air of voyeurism, as if they are peering through a viewfinder at the scene within. The quiet intimacy of the subjects, leaning against the surrounding objects of the room reflects common artistic practices within the medium. The women in these images mirror the positions of the singular artist’s study of female nudes, and yet the presence of both women causes these examples to cross the line over into the pornographic.

Why is this? All these examples are functionally the same, pictures taken by men of nude women in similar time periods. My best estimation at this time is that the presence of another contains with it the suggestion of further action. What happened in the boudoir moments after the Daguerreotype was taken? Perhaps therein lies the answer, what makes these images pornographic lies in the voyeur’s imagination.

THE PROBLEM WITH MIN: A TEMPLE WALL, A MAN, A MEMBER

Object of the Week | Caitlin McCurdy

---

During my undergraduate degree, I spent a lot of time studying one deity, the mysterious fertility/agricultural deity Min. He was of particular interest because his visual depictions often caused confusion, misinterpretation, and in the case of one temple wall fragment — outright censorship. This particular artifact is a segment of a temple wall from Koptos, a site in Upper Egypt and a major worship center for Min. Currently, the wall is housed in the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London, England. The Middle Kingdom wall depicts Pharaoh Senwosret I in a ceremonial run before Min. Min is shown standing tall before the pharaoh, fully erect.

Temple Wall UC14786 as it's currently displayed at the Petrie Museum of Art and Archaeology. (Photograph courtesy of Caitlin McCurdy)

The reasonings for his ithyphallic depictions have been debated at length. Some argue it demonstrates his, and by extension the pharaoh’s, sexual virility. This line of thinking is supported flimsily by the belief that a type of Egyptian lettuce — also an emblem of Min — works as an aphrodisiac. Without going on too long of an aside, this is not my belief. After doing an independent study project on Min, I believe he serves a more agricultural purpose. That he is always depicted erect, demonstrates more of a metaphorical seeding across the fields of Upper Egypt. 

Artist Depiction of Min. | Source

His presentation has proved to be the largest problem for his treatment in Egyptology museums. Not to mention that it’s basically impossible to consider his presentation as anything less than sexual for the modern viewer. It further complicates the understanding of this deity when one considers that this temple wall was found in 1893, during the height of Victorian morality in England. This time period invoked moral panic around the realms of nudity and the middle class.

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology was founded during the height of Egyptomania in England and during extensive colonial projects in the country. Amelia Edwards, a British author and “collector” of Egyptian artifacts, donated her collection to University College London in 1892, establishing the museum and cementing the legacy of the man who would be its first director and namesake.

William Flinders Petrie, | Source

William Flinders Petrie was a founding figure in British Egyptology during the late 19^th century. There is ample evidence that Petrie allowed his own ideals of British purity and racial hierarchy to inform his work in Egypt. If modern museums are to interrogate their position as objective and neutral caretakers of non-Western artifacts, Petrie set out to do the exact opposite of that. His personal voice and views permeated the exhibitions he created.

The temple wall currently in question was considered a problem immediately upon its arrival in London. Petrie’s solution was to create a label just large enough to cover Min’s erection, and place it directly onto the slab. This was considered sufficient to appease the sensibilities of the university population, who, at the time, was the museum’s only and desired elite audience. Referred to as a museological fig leaf, the label remained where it was from 1893, allegedly into the 1970s.

Min Censored. | Source

The temple wall in the Petrie museum may be an extreme historical example of a curator or director’s personal beliefs preventing an unbiased display from taking place, yet it also highlights the potential pitfalls of displaying an ancient culture from a modern perspective. Egyptology in itself is a colonial institution, its foundation taking place during Britain’s violent imperial actions in Egypt. How do you begin to decolonize an institution such as this? The knowledge of ancient Egypt is informed by a history of unequal contact between a colonial power and the modern civilization living where the ancient once stood. If Min’s treatment in the Petrie museum can reveal anything, it’s that the colonial roots of museums have perhaps prevented some knowledge from being fully revealed because the knowledge contained information considered unacceptable by colonial power’s social mores. 

"FOR GENTLEMEN OF MATURE YEARS & SOUND MORALS": BODHISATTVA TARA IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM'S SECRET ROOM

Object of the Week | Caitlin McCurdy

---

The centralization of Western sensibilities regarding sex when it comes to the treatment of non-Western artifacts is nothing new. When artifacts from one culture are usurped by another, the sensibilities of that new culture may cause some willful misinterpretations on the part of the interpreter, and the history of the usurped object becomes altered. This process is highlighted in the history of a statue of the Buddhist deity Tara, and its home in the British Museum’s Secretum, or as it is known by its more colloquial name, The British Museum Porn Room.

The statue is made of solid bronze, gilded in gold, and stands 143 cm high. It was made in the 7th-8th century AD in Sri Lanka. Her lower body is covered in a tight-fitting cloth knotted around the hips, her upper body is bare, revealing prominent breasts. It is this last detail that caused so much disruption upon its arrival at the British Museum. Despite Britain’s scandalization of her, Tara does not serve a sexual or erotic role in her original contexts in Medieval-era Buddhism. Tara is a spirit of generous compassion in Buddhism. Her origins can be traced to a Hindu mother goddess, eventually adopted by Buddhists. As a Bodhisattva, she guides worshippers along the spiritual path to enlightenment.

The Statue of Tara in it's current gallery at the British Museum. Source.

Tara was looted during the British annexation of Kandy in the early 19th century in Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. The British Governor of Ceylon, Robert Brownrigg donated it to the British Museum in 1830, where it would remain in storage for several decades due to the statue’s nudity, considered unacceptable by British standards. She was described as “dangerously erotic and voluptuous” and the British Museum determined this statue to be too obscene and sexual for public display, and only allowed approved men to view it and other artifacts housed in the same room. Tara is not a sexual entity in Buddhism, yet that understanding is now embedded in her history due to her presence in the Secretum.

Postcard Depicting 19th century Kandy. Source.

The 19th century in England saw a rise in Victorian sexual hysteria where it was believed that to protect an impressionable public from moral decay, the “moral perils of erotica” must be kept from them, which lead to the establishment of the Obscene Publications Act in 1857. This line of thought emerged while Britain was looting and pillaging countries across the world, in which they often found objects they determined to be of an “obscene” nature, but yet served no such purpose. This evidently led to complications when the artifacts were returned to Britain and distributed amongst their museums. With this act in mind, the British Museum established their Secretum where objects seen as too obscene or perverse were displayed for the viewing pleasure of “gentlemen of mature years and sound morals.” Men who wished to view this room had to prove that they met the arbitrary requirements to do so. Women and men of lower classes were denied access.

British Museum, 1857. Source.

What is sexual culture? And who decides who has access to the perceived obscene? The regulation of sexual culture is well documented in British history, even well before the establishment of the Obscene Publications Act or the Secretum. Considering this with the development of museums during the 19th century in Britain, clear distinctions were being drawn between art, material culture, and the obscene. The people in power decide what is obscene and what can and cannot be seen. This is directly tied to what artifacts can be held in museums and the narratives we choose to present them with as we put them in exhibitions. By collecting certain objects in one spot that gentlemen believed were for their eyes only, the British Museum decontextualized and redefined objects they stole.

While the statue of Tara is now housed in the British Museum’s China & South Asia gallery, it was not originally defined by its own culture, but rather what the colonial powers perceived it to be. That the nudity of a colonized and racialized deity was considered dangerous and erotic by the same museum that displayed and revered the nudity of Greco-Roman statues for their artistry exemplifies the long lasting and engrained Victorian sensibilities of Britain’s most identifiable museum.

TWO HISTORIES, ONE OBJECT: THE STORIES OF THE TURIN EROTIC PAPYRUS

Object of the Week | Caitlin McCurdy

---

 The erotic section of the papyrus,
Cat.2031/001=CGT55001 Photo by: Nicola Dell'Aquila and Federico Taverni/Museo Egizio.

Ask any undergraduate Egyptologist what object is most likely to invoke giggles, outlandish theories, or simply general intrigue, and they will likely mention the Turin Erotic Papyrus. I certainly found myself drawn to the many questions the artifact posed while studying the great mysteries and stories of ancient Egypt. Yet, this particular papyrus always felt like a footnote, an afterthought, never getting its own conclusion. The papyrus itself is in poor shape, large patches are missing and what’s left is fading, but contained in its disheveled nature is a history that still has not been fully deciphered.

The illustration shows young women, drawn in typical Egyptian art beauty standards engaging in sexual acts with men, who are notably not drawn in the Egyptian art canon’s set standards for men. They are balding and bearded with comically enlarged genitalia. These explicit scenes become all the more peculiar once you look at the drawing of animals engaging in other daily life activities that also appear on the papyrus. The nature of both scenes may suggest a satirical purpose, perhaps to mock the aristocracy of ancient Egypt, or to scandalize contemporary viewers. There is little text that has been preserved so only interpretations based solely on image is possible.

This feels like a study of absences by making interpretations on the lack of information, assumptions about why this artifact was ignored for so long, and then treated like an anomaly instead of an artifact filled with potential information on the attitude of ancient Egyptians towards sex.

Animals participating in activities of daily life = satire ? 

Cat.2031/001=CGT55001 Photo by: Nicola Dell'Aquila and Federico Taverni/Museo Egizio 

A Fragmented History

Currently housed in the Egyptian Museum, or Museo Egizio, in Turin, Italy, the papyri was a part of the museum’s 1824 founding collection made up of over 5,000 artifacts from the cabinet of curiosities of diplomat and explorer Bernadino Drovetti. Drovetti was a 19th century antiquities collector, part of a movement that predated modern archaeological practices. Due to his well-documented habit of intimidating other collectors and inability to record the context in which he discovered objects, the original provenance of many objects is unknown. They were created in ancient Egypt and their story before ending up in the Museo Egizio collection has been lost to time.

The papyrus was found in Deir el Medina, a worker’s village near the necropolis Thebes, active from approximately 1550-1080 BCE. This site is particularly unique as it contains rare artifacts of daily life in ancient Egypt. The inclusion of the erotic papyrus among wills, court documents, and grocery lists suggests a purpose outside the realm of death, which so much of Egyptian material history is concerned with.

Cat.2031/001=CGT55001  Photo by: Nicola Dell'Aquila and Federico Taverni/Museo Egizio. 

Sex & Sensibilities

Can we imagine the shock of a 19th century explorer upon discovering this papyrus? What would he have said about it? The history of any Egyptian artifact is fragmented and takes place across two different time periods. The first history is that of the original creators and users. The individual in Deir el Medina who drew this papyrus, for a purpose we cannot confirm. The second history is that of Bernadino Drovetti and his contemporaries and their influence on the trajectory of the artifacts they encountered on their quasi-archaeological digs as they removed the objects from their contexts and told their own stories with them. Today it is listed on the museum’s online papyrus database, its current status listed as off display for preservation

Artist Recreation of the Papyrus. Source

When we, as modern museum professionals, look upon the artifact we only see the first history through the veil of the second. To understand what the Turin Erotic Papyrus meant to the ancient Egyptians and their views of sex, we need to look at Drovetti and the societal context he studied in, and the attitudes towards sex of Egyptologists in general. The history of colonial aggression and Western repression is embedded into the foundations of the field itself and as a result permeates the objects we study. So much of what remains of Egyptian material culture relates to the dead: mortuary cults, funerary rites, and of course the famous and crowd-drawing mummies. Here we have a piece of their living culture, and yet we do not know what to do with it. Sex as both a part of human life and its place in museums has been treated as an oddity, an outlier, but perhaps with consideration of our own biases we can look at the Turin Erotic Papyrus with new eyes and appreciation.