What's next for Gandhara Connections?

What’s next for Gandhara Connections?

May 2022 sees the culmination of the five years of activities envisaged for CARC’s Gandhara Connections project. Our aim was to enable and stimulate the study of Gandharan art and its links to the Graeco-Roman world. Thanks to the wonderful support of the Bagri Foundation, the Neil Kreitman Foundation and Richard Beleson, we have been able to do that through a variety of events, publications, and online resources.

Since 2016 we have held 5 ground-breaking international workshops, 5 annual lectures, 7 museum events, seminars and film-showings. We have hosted a 3D scanning project and an artist-in-residence.

We have published 5 open access books, and since we make our work as accessible as we can through the internet, the project’s dedicated webpages now host no fewer than 80 recordings of events, 10 blogs, 5 introductory essays, 2 interviews, a gallery of high-resolution coin images, and the Gandharan Art Bibliography, with well over 3,000 references.

You can find all these resources at www.carc.ox.ac.uk/GandharaConnections

But this is not the end… Although we have achieved what we set out to do, we have many more plans for the future. We’re looking forward to publishing a new open access book by Peter Stewart called Gandharan Art and the Classical World: A Short Introduction. Due out from Archaeopress in October 2022, it will be available in print and free online. It will be followed in March 2023 by the book of our last workshop on Gandharan Art in its Buddhist Context. We will continue to maintain and enhance our Gandhara webpages and social media, to hold new events, and develop fresh projects on this inexhaustibly fascinating subject.

CARC also has broader ambitions. Building on the best elements of Gandhara Connections, in 2022 we’re launching a new initiative called #AncientArtConnections. Under this umbrella heading we’ll be holding events and publishing on many different aspects of the relationship between Greek and Roman art and the wider ancient world. To start this initiative – and as an add-on to Gandhara Connections – the generosity of the Bagri Foundation is enabling us to hold another international workshop, scheduled in hybrid form for 21st-22nd March 2023: ‘Classical Art and Ancient India’.

So save the date and watch out for more news!