Beneath the Ivory is Molten Brown

Beneath the Ivory is Molten Brown from Scottish Pakistani interdisciplinary artist Aqsa Arif combines moving image installation and textile photo prints, crafting a narrative of the Lakshmi/Yakshi/Nymph, oscillating between South Asian ancestral memory and western assimilation.

Drawing on resonances between South Asian and Greco-Roman mythic forms, Aqsa embodies the misnamed “Pompeii Lakshmi,” a first-century CE Indian ivory statuette discovered in 1938. Estranged from her origins as a yakshi and reshaped through translation and reclassification, her avatar becomes a site of composite identity, reflecting historical Roman practices in which imported deities and motifs were absorbed, adapted, and transformed within visual culture.