Present

“The Silk Roads: between vestiges and imagination”

From June 22, 2024 to September 29, 2024

Routes of trade and exchange between Asia and the West from the 2nd century BC to the Middle Ages, the Silk Roads have always provoked a real fascination in the collective imagination. The Var exhibition hall in Draguignan invites you to explore this concept invented in the 19th century, with its new summer exhibition: The Silk Roads, between vestiges and imagination.

The Silk Roads, these ancestral trade routes that stretched thousands of kilometers across Asia, played a considerable role in history by connecting civilizations, peoples, cultures. Over the centuries, they have seen the transit of not only precious goods such as silk, spices and jewels, but also knowledge, beliefs and traditions. They were the scene of encounters between peoples with varied languages, customs and religions. “For people who do not know the subject, the exhibition The Silk Roads, Between Vestiges and Imagination is a wonderful proposition for discovery,” underlines Valérie Zaleski, curator of the exhibition to be discovered at the Hôtel Départemental des Expositions. from Var to Draguignan, from June 22 to September 29. “The idea is to show what these routes and the regions of the world crossed were like at a time when there was a lot of trade. Today, the main heirs are the Uyghurs… And unfortunately we know what is happening now…”

Thus, the exhibition wishes to explore and confront the representations that the Silk Roads can arouse in the imagination, with the material, artistic and historical vestiges which bear witness to their existence. It focuses on a period from their development, at a time of relative peace in the Chinese Han and Roman empires, in the 2nd century BC, to the Mongol Empire of the Yuan in the 13th century.

Exhibition curator: Madame ZALESKI Valérie - Curator of the Chinese and Central Asian Buddhist collections at the Guimet Museum.