Art of the Ancestors Batak Gallery Renovation
This month, Art of the Ancestors is doubling the number of masterworks in our Batak gallery. Batak is a term of convenience, likely applied by indigenous coastal Malays and later by Dutch colonial authorities, to groups of linguistically and culturally intertwined highlanders living in and around Lake Toba in North Sumatra. The groups that fall under this sobriquet include the Toba, Karo, Pak Pak, Simalungan, Angkola, and Mandailing peoples.
Their exogamous patrilineal clans are known as Marga. There is an appreciative sense of being caught in a timeless spell cast by long-standing traditions for anyone who has ever been to a traditional Batak village. The Batak excelled in writing, oral traditions, poetry, and the plastic arts. Their ability to carve in minutiae is particularly noteworthy and of justly critical acclaim.
Among the newly illustrated items are the paraphernalia of a datu, or man of knowledge, who was also adept in white and black magic practices. They include intricately carved emblematic staffs (tongkat panaluan), elaborately decorated large horn containers (naga morsarang), and small trade jars with well-carved stoppers for the storing of puk-puk, or magical substances. Examples from numerous museums include items from American institutions such as the Yale Art Gallery (Thomas Jaffe collection), Dallas Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Fowler Museum at UCLA. There are contributions from European collections, including The British Museum, Musée du Quai Branly, Museum für Volkerkunde, Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, and Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen. Of great emotive depth and consequence are pieces from the Museum Nasional in Jakarta. Among those items is a haunting mourning mask. It depicts a deceased person having a last lingering look at the living, while the living honor and bid adieu to the deceased. The virtuosity of this mask, and in general, Batak mastery of a wide range of mediums, is an invitational ticket to delight in Art of the Ancestors' latest gallery reinstallation.