Events

This seminar centers on a previously unknown photograph album from 1905, whose images constitute the last photographic representations of Yıldız Palace before its wholesale dismantling in 1909 in the aftermath of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II’s deposition. [mehr]

The statue of Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, was designed by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi for the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The Third Republic installed it in the Collège de France. As an expression of the imperial consciousness of world and knowledge, the statue is undermined by its own pictorial programme and refers to problems of French universalism that Champollion himself had already reflected on. [mehr]

Morad Montazami will present and discuss the exhibition he curated, Arab Presences. Modern Art and Decolonization. Paris 1908-1988 (Musée d’art moderne de Paris, as the first attempt to gather a short 20^th century global picture and micro-history of Arab artistic trajectories in Paris. [mehr]

The distinction between truth and fantasy has long structured studies of Orientalist painting in the Italian sphere. This lecture explores critical and historiographical blind spots regarding this problematic genre from the nineteenth century to the postcolonial era. [mehr]

This seminar is devoted to an exploration of three cities that claimed the title of being a New Jerusalem. More specifically, we will explore aspects of the rise and development of the Christian veneration of saints and relics as a decidedly urban phenomenon in the cities of Constantinople, Rome, and Venice from the late antique to the early modern period. [mehr]

That bronze and other black stony materials could be – but were not always – signifiers of the black body haunts the art of bronze casting through Cordier and Carpeaux and even to the work of Kehinde Wiley today. This talk looks at the traces of the beginnings of these same debates in the milieu of Gianlorenzo Bernini. [mehr]

The relationship between avant-garde artists and consumer culture has often been framed as antagonistic. Nonetheless, in the period between the First and Second World Wars, commercial display became a significant means through which modern design was introduced to the general public. Recent studies have demonstrated how commercial display practices have “contributed to the formulation of new forms of aesthetic experience, as well as art and design typologies” (Lasc et al. 2017: 5). Taking as a case study the Romanian avant-garde movement, this talk examines how the visual realm of retail practices intersected with new trends in art and design, in particular the introduction of modern design for the domestic interior in Bucharest. [mehr]