Awe, Scale, and the Practice of Looking Up

Image credits: Reena Saini Kallat, Hyphenated Lives (Pea-kar), 2015

Across cultures, epochs, and disciplines, humans have looked to the sky not only to measure and map it, but to situate themselves within it. The sky has functioned as calendar and compass, myth and mathematics, deity and diagram, threat and shelter. It has shaped how societies imagine origins and endings, how they organise power and humility, and how they negotiate fate, freedom, and collective responsibility.

This workshop invites participants to move slowly through these questions in dialogue with MAP’s exhibition Beneath the Turning Sky. Drawing from visual art, cosmology, mathematics, speculative fiction, Indigenous knowledge systems, and philosophy, the workshop deliberately blurs distinctions between science and spirituality, abstraction and belief, and empirical knowledge and lived experience.