Opening of RedGold’s Exhibition
A photo report by Alexandre Rouvrais, with comments by the project’s management
On September 23, 2024 took place the opening of the photo exhibition of the research programme ‘A Red Golden Legend: Hagiographic experiments in the former USSR and popular democracies’ of the French National Agency for Research, at the Humathèque of the Condorcet Campus of Paris. Entitled ‘The return of the saints in the (post-)communist worlds’, it presented a selection of field photographs by the RedGold Project’s participants, taken between the late 1980s, for some, and the present.
Figures 1 & 2: Opening speeches by the event’s host, Michel Zumkir, Manager of the Cultural Service at the Humathèque, and by the organisers Stéphane Dudoignon and Marie-Paule Hille, in presence of the exhibition’s commissar Liya Ma and of participants and guests
Figure 3: Welcome address by the event’s host, Michel Zumkir, the Manager of the Cultural Service at the Humathèque Condorcet.
The exhibition will last until December 14 — an exceptionally long period for an event of this kind on the Condorcet Campus (a new academic space, which gathers several leading public higher education and research institutions in the north of Paris, since the late 2010s). Visits of the exhibition are organised regularly for the students and staff of the campus. A catalogue should be published in the wake of the RedGold Project’s sixth and final international workshop, in September 2025.
The first ambition of the organisers was to promote part of the raw field material of researchers in history and in social sciences, by questioning the relationship they entertain with the characters, the places, the imaginaries that constitute the objects of their investigation. More than many others, the theme of the reappearance of cultures of holiness and of the return of the saints in current societies places the researcher — who is sometimes perceived by her/his informants as . . . an auxiliary of the hagiographic process — at the very centre of her/his object, which gives back to social science research its dialectical dimension, as the result of interactions. The choice, for the project and its exhibition, of Islam in the (post-)communist worlds, from the Balkans to China, was to allow comparisons between beliefs, rituals and celebrations on a wide continental space, united for a time by state communism and the social marginalisation of religion, before the ‘revivals’ that one can observe here and there since the last decades of the 20th century, sometimes triggered by the local academia and international research.
Figure 4: Visitors wander between giant portrait panels of 20th-century Muslim spiritual leaders from the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia (at the forefront: Ishan ‘Allama of Regar, in Tajikistan, photographed in the mid-2000s).
The introduction to the exhibition provides a graphic overview of the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist totalitarianisms that repressed the public expression of religion, and sometimes its very practice, until the escheat of the ideologies of the dictatorship of the proletariat (in the late 1970s in China, in the late 1980s in the USSR and the Balkans). Through photographs of members of the RedGold project, taken since 1989, the exhibition itself offers an immersion in different hagiographic processes observed in various fields, while reflecting a wide diversity of approaches by research, historical and anthropological.
Post-communist societies (post-Maoist for China) have been favouring, for their Muslim saints, special virtues that are often absent from life stories of premodern Muslim men or women of God, as well as from cultures of sainthood in other religious systems under communist rule. Among these virtues (in Arabic, kamālāt: ‘perfections’), longevity has allowed many a holy figure of Islam in the short 20th century to play a role of transmission of a spirituality that is interpreted, nowadays, as cultural legacy. Today, the veneration of these transmitters of Muslim high culture has involved the conservation out of sight or, on the contrary, the public exhibition of relics that belonged to them, or of photographic portraits of theirs — sometimes even of statues, a heritage of . . . communist practice — that have sometimes become objects of iconolatry in secular as well as in religious spaces, further blurring the interface between the two.
Figure 7: The ‘Sociability’ section displays photos of religious assemblies dedicated to the celebration of great ancestors most of the time active in the short 20th century, and of places, now considered sacred, where they have been active.
Visitors find themselves immersed in the materiality of cults focused on this transmission and on the particular quest for links between generations: with their baraka, the memory of these men (more rarely women) of God is summoned during gatherings celebrating their role as bearers of Islamicate high culture. In many instances, the assemblies of members of a local Sufi lodge use to revolve around the remembrance of this lodge’s founders, of its spiritual lineage and of its most recent masters. The visitors of the exhibition are transported into the specific sound atmosphere of these get-togethers, listening to the recording of contemporary performances of the dhikr (in Islam, the mystical ceremony of invocation of the divine).
The hagiographic experiments observed for half a century in the (post-)communist worlds are manifested, too, by the transformation into sanctuaries of spaces linked to the life of these holy figures. Many of these spaces were initially private, due to the mass confiscations and destructions of the mid-20th century, and to the forbidding of public religious practice. Now sanctified, often enlarged and embellished, many of them have been hosting community rituals. At the same time, they often bear the mark of the sociodemographic engineering of state communism — as in the case of the modern sanctuaries located on the territories of those former collective farms where such or such group of Sufis has been relocated, in areas where they were previously absent, in contexts of mass population resettlements. A side effect of this sociodemographic engineering of the USSR or of the PRC has been the diffusion of Sufism and of the cult of its modern great ancestors to new geographic spaces, notably to the core of the collective farm system and, at a more recent date, to the diasporas created or developed by economic and/or political emigration.
Figures 8 & 9: For the illustration of these spatial and temporal developments, the exhi-bition’s commissar, Liya Ma, has imagined a monumental scroll system inspired by the spiritual genealogies that are sometimes sus-pended on the wall of modern Sufi hostelries, in the Balkans especially.
Among other impacts of the communist rule’s cultural norms: an unprecedented emphasis on a range of scriptures and of the written text in general, in an unprecedented, too, variety of languages, writing systems, calligraphies, print and broadcast techniques. Permitted by the mass schooling typical of the short 20th century, and enhanced by the socio-industrial revolutions of the early 21st, this particular development is illustrated, notably, by the evolution of epigraphic practices: The tombstones of modern men and women of God, if they remain aniconic, are often distinguished from older monuments by the frequent display of elements of life story, borrowed from oral traditions that have been handed down by descendants and aspirants of the inhumated spiritual master. Strengthening a new mutual intimacy of the oral and the written, these processes highlight the current omnipresence of texts in the making — the combined heritage of the heroic mood of state communism, on the first hand, and of a long marginalisation and repression of religion on the other.
Figure 10: This typological evolution is characteristic of a common heritage of mass liter-acy, but also of peculiar blurring of the boundaries between the sacred and the profane. It has been traced in the final section of the visit by the exhibition of a choice of tomb-stones, arranged into a small necropolis, dating from the mid-20th century to the present and coming from regions as diverse as the Balkans, the Urals, Tajikistan or Xinjiang.
Updated technical info on the exhibition can be found at:
https://www.humatheque-condorcet.fr/fr/agenda-de-lhumatheque/une-legende-rouge-doree
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Red Gold (November 15, 2024). Opening of RedGold’s Exhibition. RedGold. Retrieved January 24, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12s74
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