National Museum of Australia exhibition shows girl power was feared and revered through the ages

Aphrodite: Les Folies Tour celebrated Kylie's album and single of the same name, and saw the pop star emerge from stage atop a golden conch shell as a goddess, in full Greek Goddess regalia.

It's a reference most would be familiar with - the birth of the goddess of beauty, love, pleasure and procreation, emerging from a seashell after Cronus castrated her father, Uranus, and threw his genitalia into the sea.

And sure, it's a dance-pop track that, like much of Kylie's extensive catalogue, celebrates female empowerment and the general enjoyment of life, with all its travails and triumphs.

A dress from that show, designed by Dolce & Gabbana and usually held at the Arts Centre in Melbourne, will be on display alongside some very different depictions of Aphrodite - or Venus, as she's known in her Roman incarnation - as part of a major exhibition at the National Museum of Australia this summer.

Kylie - or rather, her gown - takes its place in a long and complex narrative. The megastar had recovered from cancer and was at the top of her game when she came up with her goddess theme and produced another bestseller.

But Aphrodite the goddess was born of violence and conflict; depictions of her in Greek poetry and drama highlight her extramarital affairs and jealous rages, her tendency to punish and humiliate gods and mortals. It's the passion that shines through, and, in modern terms, lends itself to the themes of self-affirmation and female strength. Her Roman counterpart, Venus, came to symbolise virility, rather than sexual desire, and Early Empire statesmen would attribute their flair for battle to her.

From a 150CE marble statue, to a 21st-century designer gown, there are uncountable threads, narratives and concepts that have resonated through the ages.

Feared and Revered: Feminine Power Through the Ages is a larger version of a show at the British Museum, and includes more than 160 objects spanning six continents and 5000 years. It highlights the many facets of feminine power through the themes of creation, passion, war, justice and mercy, and how it has shaped human society through the ages.

Cheryl Crilly, the exhibition's National Museum of Australia curator, says the show is a no-brainer when it comes to mass appeal; we've always been in thrall to the vast collection of the British Museum - the more ancient the stuff, the better.

This will be the fifth such partnership, but unlike last year's offering of artefacts from Ancient Greece, this one is surprisingly cross-cultural, and filled with surprising, even jarring, juxtapositions of style and subject matter. Monumental sculpture and sacred, ancient artefacts sit alongside contemporary artworks, Australian Indigenous representations of female ancestral figures, and pop culture embodiments of the divine.

At the heart of it is the feminine form, both physical and metaphysical, and much of it is weirdly and comfortingly familiar.

British Museum curator Belinda Crerar says when the team set out to build such an exhibition, it was a question of how to whittle down the museum's vast collection of items that filled the brief, and organise them into themes.

"This was one that was born out of a desire to do something that's focused on women's lives, women's experiences in history, and the realisation that there are so many artistic representations of women - or female figures, rather - in the British Museum's collection," she says.

"The majority of these have some sort of spiritual religious importance, so that's why we decided to explore this topic through the theme of spiritual belief.

"And what I found personally very interesting about the subject was not only the vast number of female spiritual beings that are worshipped or venerated or feared around the world, throughout history, but also how varied and multifaceted these figures are or perceived to be."

In Canberra, Crilly says, there's a sense of excitement about the show, building amongst a new cohort of museum-goers. Even among those who don't normally go in for museum exhibits at all.

"Obviously this is not a gendered exhibition as such, but these objects largely are of eminent or have female characteristics, so there's a lot of interest from women ... [particularly] younger women," she says.

"I don't want to say it, but there is an element of ... girl power in this. That is, [we expect to draw] audiences that always come to British Museum shows and who are regular national museum goers, but perhaps audiences that normally wouldn't, maybe, step inside a museum, or not that regularly. So that's really encouraging to see and really exciting."

And it's hard to ignore the time-wave the show is surfing. Female empowerment, embodied in the #MeToo and Time's Up movements, a growing sense of end times for the prevailing attitudes towards women and their place in the world - it's in the air, and this show is floating right into it. It brings with it a kaleidoscopic whirl of colour, style and era, remarkably eclectic, but also consistent. The female form, in all its guises, has been a kind of talisman through the ages.

"This exhibition explores, through these female beings, some of those really important universal themes that are particularly important at the moment around female power and authority and identity and representation," Crilly says.

"I think there is something timely about this show ...To take the temperature of our community today, I don't think we would have had the conversation that we're hearing 10 years ago, and that's got to do with the themes in the show, which I guess really resonate with a lot of the cultural discourse and debate that's present at the moment in the society that we live in."

Asking a curator to nominate a favourite object in a large and sprawling show is sacrilege, to be sure, but both Crilly and Crerar gravitate towards ancient objects that feel startlingly relevant.

For Crerar, it's a series of amulets or good luck charms - "incredibly beautiful, very small" - of the Egyptian warrior goddess Sekhmet.

"They're made of all sorts of different materials. Some are very cheap materials, so probably would have been owned by people who were poorer members of society, and some are made of gold, and some precious gemstones," she says.

"So you can see just in that collection that these were objects that were used by all echelons of society. What's really interesting about these is that Sekhmet is the lioness-headed goddess of Egypt, she's connected with war and plague and destruction and annihilation, she's a violent force and energy.

"But she's also connected with life and healing, so it's likely these amulets were carried for protection and for health - maybe by the living, maybe they were buried with the dead. And they're very personal objects.

"We have them alongside a huge monumental statue of Sekhmet, and there, we're just trying to emphasise the public royal importance of the goddess to the pharaoh, but also to ordinary people, and how these beliefs resonate throughout all of society."

Crilly is drawn to a different series of tokens - a series of marble Cycladic figures of the female form, dating from 2000 to 800 BCE.

"They are among the earliest objects in the show ... I love the fine marble that they created, and their beautiful minimalist forms and their symmetry and their stylised anatomical features," she says.

"And then you see the moulded breasts and pubic area - thousands of these things were found, they're discovered on settlement sites, in graves. And then the fact that their meaning is still a bit mysterious is really intriguing to me ... They're small enough to have been carried on the living [or] buried with the dead.

"Given the number that have been found that are female or embody feminine characteristics, that suggests that women or femininity were culturally or spiritually important to these early societies."

Crerar is also taken with the Australian Indigenous representations of female ancestral figures, some created recently and acquired for the exhibition, including the Yawkyawk objects from Western Arnhem Land. These depict young female ancestral beings who inhabit freshwater pools and streams.

"There's several contemporary artworks dotted throughout the show, and what I find quite interesting to reflect on with them is some of them show how beliefs persist and remain very unchanged throughout the centuries," she says.

"Others show how beliefs are malleable and evolve and adapt in response to societal changes. So that's, again, another thing to reflect on as you're going through the exhibition."

Back in Canberra, where Crilly has been busy with the curating team uncrating and arranging precious objects, it's the threads through time that affect her the most. From Kylie's dress (which will be on display for only part of the show) to an Italian gold ring featuring the fearsome head of Medusa, it's something of a mind-bending sensation of time-travel.

"You just carry that power through time and here you are in front of me - I just had this little moment of just me and the figure, lying there on the trolley - it hadn't been put in the showcase yet," she says, of the Cycladic figures.

"I just thought, where have you come from?"

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