More than one story

There’s surely a lot to unpack here. And you are probably wondering: what’s the story? Well the answer is that there’s more than one story and yet there’s only one.

This particular piece of art, the singha, is an agent, representative of everything you have just read. It’s a story of its transformations, its travels from the ivory’s tusk from where it derived to its crafting and trading between Mughal india and Dutch merchants… until it finally reached private collections of people such as Gerrit-Jan Verburgt and was later obtained on loan by the Rijksmuseum depot.

If we think about it, people used an animal to make another animal. This is where our story starts. The tusk of an elephant was carved to depict a lion. The singha, before coming into contact with humans, belonged to another world: the animal kingdom.

Ivory had to transform so that we humans could understand it. The singha, from a ‘mere’ animal tusk, became an artistic expression of artisan expertise, a trading good, a fascination for collectors and in the end an object of study.

The singha statue was but one outcome of all of this and so it became adorned with teeth… that came from other teeth. The question now is: how do we make fake teeth? (Dentists are not allowed to answer)