Performances of portraits: Ubiquity, minimality, and proximity with pictures of a late Sufi Sheikh (original) (raw)
Related papers
The profane visual repertoire and the workshops of the artists around the Mediterranean area during Middle Ages came from different religious and cultural realities such as the Normand Sicily, the Maghreb and Al-Andalus. The cultural and political openness experienced by the Aragonese Crown with the territorial expansion of the king James I the Conqueror made the incoming and outgoing of iconographic models easy all around the geographical area. The figures of the painted ceilings during the XIII-XV centuries are a faithful prove. The painted ceiling as a support with a wide and complex repertoire of images, let us stablish a relationship among models and iconographic resources as they show the cultural cohabitation and the influence exercised among the different ethnic and religious communities. At first, the order, the quantity and the diversity of representations had given us way to feel them as marginal. The growing interest of the investigators and the changing methodology of the Art History allows us prove the opposite. What is being developed and discussed in scientific meetings and published materials is that this specific figurative repertoire often has a vehicular message that supplies different data about the concept of work of art in itself, the ideologist of the piece, the functionality of the space where it’s located or the willing and taste of the promoter. Scenes of courtesan and knightly life, feasts and dances are centred in the ceilings, both in holy and laic spaces. The dance, specifically, can be used as a mirror of this medieval society both complex and poliedric. The movement of some figures are above the mere staging of some gestures to give way to a whole set of representations with a significant aspect. The topic will be focused on the exhibition of these points, object of our investigation and its relevance for the science.
Il presente volume riproduce il fascicolo I (tomo I) del 2015 della rivista telematica semestrale Horti Hesperidum. Studi di storia del collezionismo e della storiografia artistica. Cura redazionale: Ilaria Sforza Direttore responsabile: Autorizzazione del tribunale di Roma n. 315/2010 del 14 luglio 2010 Sito internet: www.horti-hesperidum.com/ La rivista è pubblicata sotto il patrocinio di Università degli Studi di Roma "Tor Vergata" Dipartimento di Studi letterari, Filosofici e Storia dell'arte Serie monografica: ISSN 2239-4133 Rivista Telematica: ISSN 2239-4141 Prima della pubblicazione gli articoli presentati a Horti Hesperidum sono sottoposti in forma anonima alla valutazione dei membri del comitato scientifico e di referee selezionati in base alla competenza sui temi trattati. Gli autori restano a disposizione degli aventi diritto per le fonti iconografiche non individuate. PROPRIETÀ LETTERARIA RISERVATA A norma della legge sul diritto d'autore e del codice civile è vietata la riproduzione di questo libro o parte di esso con qualsiasi mezzo, elettronico, meccanico, per mezzo di fotocopie, microfilm, registrazioni o altro. 157 ALENA ROBIN, A Nazarene in the nude. Questions of representation in devotional images of New Spain 201 PAOLO SANVITO, Arte e architettura «dotata di anima» in Bernini: le reazioni emotive nelle fonti coeve 239 TONINO GRIFFERO, Vive, attive e contagiose. Il potere transitivo delle immagini 277 ABSTRACTS 307 4 TOMO II PIETRO CONTE, «Non più uomini di cera, ma vivissimi». Per una fenomenologia dell'iperrealismo 7 ARIANA DE LUCA, Dall'ekphrasis rinascimentale alla moderna scrittura critica: il contributo di Michael Baxandall 27 A. MANODORI SAGREDO, La fotografia 'ruba' l'anima: da Daguerre al selfie 77 FILIPPO KULBERG TAUB, «They Live!» Oltre il lato oscuro del reale 91 ALESSIA DE PALMA, L'artista Post-Human nel rapporto tra uomo e macchina 105 ABSTRACTS 115 Horti Hesperidum, V, 2015, I 1 EDITORIALE CARMELO OCCHIPINTI Vide da lontano un busto grandissimo; che da principio immaginò dovere essere di pietra, e a somiglianza degli ermi colossali veduti da lui, molti anni prima, nell'isola di Pasqua. Ma fattosi più da vicino, trovò che era una forma smisurata di donna seduta in terra, col busto ritto, appoggiato il dosso e il gomito a una montagna; e non finta ma viva; di volto mezzo tra bello e terribile, di occhi e di capelli nerissimi; la quale guardavalo fissamente; e stata così un buono spazio senza parlare, all'ultimo gli disse: «Chi sei?» G. LEOPARDI, Dialogo della natura e di un islandese Poco prima che si chiudesse l'anno 2013, nel sito internet di «Horti Hesperidum» veniva pubblicato il call for papers sul tema delle «Immagini vive». Nonostante la giovane età della rivista -giravano, ancora, i fascicoli delle sole prime due annate -, sorprendentemente vasta fu, da subito, la risposta degli studiosi di più varia formazione: archeologi, medievisti, modernisti e contemporaneisti. In poche settimane, infatti, il nostro call for papers si trovò a essere rilanciato, attraverso i siti internet di diverse università e istituti di ricerca, in tutto il mondo. Risonanza di gran lunga inferiore, nonostante l'utilizzo degli stessi canali, riuscivano invece a ottenere le analoghe iniziative di lì a poco condotte da «Horti Hesperidum» su argomenti specialisticamente meglio definiti come quello della Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (1567) di Lodovico Guicciardini (a proposito dei rapporti artistici tra Italia e Paesi nordici nel XVI secolo), e del Microcosmo della pittura (1667) di C. OCCHIPINTI 6
2020
Il corso intende fornire agli studenti una comprensione approfondita della nozione di PERSONA. Adottando una prospettiva semiotica, analizzeremo questo concetto così come è stato sviluppato nel corso del tempo in diversi tipi di discorso e generi testuali, dal discorso religioso e teologico, a quello normativo e giuridico, a quello etico e scientifico, a quello artistico. The goal of the course is to provide students with an in-depth comprehension of the notion of PERSON. By adopting a semiotic perspective, we will analyze this concept as it was developed across centuries in different types of discourses and textual genres, from religious and theological to normative and judicial discourse, from ethic and scientific to artistic discourse. Opening session and General Introduction For any further information about this project, please see nemosancti.eu 0 This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 757314).
This article examines the work of seven contemporary artists whose aesthetics exemplify the “lived” experience of Islamic mysticism or Sufism (Arabic tasawwuf) within a European context. The work of artists born in Islamic majority countries and familiar with “traditional” Sufi idioms and discourses, but now immersed in Western culture, is often associated with “diasporic art”. From this hybrid perspective some of their artistic narratives reconfigure or even subvert the “traditional” Sufi idioms, and do so in such a way as to provoke a more profound sensory experience in the viewer than traditional forms of art. Drawing upon recent methodological tendencies inspired by the “aesthetic turn”, this study explores post- and decolonial ways of thinking about Sufi-inspired artworks, and the development of a transcultural Sufi-inspired aesthetic within the context of migration and displacement over the last half-century.
Regards, 2019
What ways do portraits relate people to aesthetic practices and social configurations when representational and individualizing assumptions that ensue from figurative art cannot be assumed? If social being is not given, an art act might be seen to affect primarily an artist's relation to the possibility of subjectivity. The idea that the audience of an artwork includes the artist herself raises questions about her self-understanding and social being. Building on my ethnographic research, I conduct a speculative examination of portraiture in relation to the career of Saloua Raouda Choucair towards founding a local art history. To conduct my review, I borrow tools from contemporary art, anachronistically, to demonstrate that we may learn ways of studying from art itself. Tending to the mundane, minute, intermeshed matters of childhood education, daily life, and encounters with audiences, I speculate that Choucair's abstract sculptures offer "portraits" of becoming, germinations for beings to come. Mots-clés | Saloua Raouda Choucair-Portraiture-Contemporary Art-Local Art History-Ethnographic approach.
International Conference "The Thinking of the Image - La pensée de l'image - Das Denken des Bildes"
What shall we call an “image”? Is it that from which knowledge proceeds or that which anticipates knowledge? Is image something only able to be recognised as object of thinking or it shows per se, in its polysemy and equivocal constitution, a deep, still unexplored generative form of thinking? From the point of view of the understanding of the digital age, where we entered in, to a strong consideration of the new frontiers of science, knowledge, and philosophy and from here up to societal and cultural dimensions, the thinking of the image still remain an enigma. Since the ancient world, the philosophical antiquity from Plato to Aristotle has left this question as a legacy. This question has continued to pursue the history of thought: Islamic World and Christianity, Middle and Modern Age. It can be found massively in contemporary philosophy, culture studies, history of art and ideas. The aim of the international conference is, perhaps for the first time, to study and to explore in a genuine interdisciplinary approach the multiversal horizon of human imagery and, in particular its constructive, generative capacity of building a world-meaning. The international conference is organised on the behalf of the IEA of the University Aix-Marseille (IMéRA) in collaboration with the LESA, Laboratoire d’Études en Sciences des Arts (EA 3274) and the Research Group on the Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Image and Imaginary: Fausto Fraisopi, Professor at Freiburg University and Senior Research Fellow at IMéRA, Agnès Callu, Research HDR at the CNRS (LAP - Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique, EHESS/CNRS, UMR 8177), Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Research Director at the CéSor (Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux EHESS) and Alexander Schnell, Professor for Philosophy at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and Director of the Institute for Transcendental Philosophy and Phenomenology.
Verbaliser l’image : Titrer et trahir
2008
Le titre semble relancer, une nouvelle fois, les difficiles enjeux du rapport entre mot et image, entre écrit et visuel. Il semble nous replonger au coeur du champ d'apories que soulève la détermination de l'antériorité et donc de l'autorité-philosophique, sémiotique, phénoménologique, voire métapsychologique-d'un langage sur l'autre. Le titre doit-il être considéré comme irrémédiablement extérieur au travail visuel de l'oeuvre, fonctionnant sous des cieux sémiotiques et donc sémantiques distincts? Ou est-il plutôt une trace laissée par l'artiste, comme une clef accrochée à la cimaise des musées, indiquant ce qu'il y a à voir dans l'image ? Ou encore est-il irrémédiablement en aval de l'oeuvre elle-même, une obligation institutionnelle, un simple « hors-d'oeuvre » (Derrida) qui, s'il s'offre parfois à interpréter l'oeuvre, ne saurait garantir la justesse de sa lecture? Ces questions sont vertigineuses, elles interrogent la possibilité même d'une communication entre le régime visuel et le régime verbal. À l'extrême, elles mettent à vif la fragilité de certains fondements épis-Once again, the title seems to introduce difficulties in the relationship between words and images, the written and the visual. It seems to take us back to the heart ofthe aporia that determined the precedence and then the authority-philosophical, semiotic, phenomenological, even meta-psychological-of one language over another. Should the title be considered as irremediably apart from the work's visual aspect, functioning in an arena that is semiotically and hence semantically distinct? Or is it a trace the artist leaves as a key, attached to the wall of museums, indicating what there is to see in the image? Does it come irremediably after the work, an institutional obligation, a simple "hors-d'oeuvre" to quote Derrida, which is sometimes presented as an aid to interpreting the work, but does not guarantee an accurate reading? These are exhilarating questions: they examine the possibility of communication between the visual and verbal systems. In the extreme, they show a frailty in some of art history's epistemological foundations.
SELFHOOD AND SUBJECTIVITY IN SUFI THOUGHT: Image of a Mole on Emperor Akbar’s Nose
Theosofi Journal of Sufism and Islamic Thought, 2021
This paper addresses the making of portrait-images of Mughal emperors, in which distinctness and particularity in individual features distinguished portraits of emperor Akbar from his ancestors and successors. Scholars have argued that the technique of ‘accurate’ portraits or mimesis, was introduced to Mughal artists with the arrival of renaissance paintings and prints from Europe, brought by Jesuit priests to the Mughal court. However, the question of why Mughal emperors saw a need to arrive at portraiture in the likeness of individuals, remains to be addressed. My paper argues that the desire to portray a ruler, in all his individual particularity, can arise only within a literary and intellectual matrix in which the individual is valued, and where ideas about selfhood and subjectivity have already permeated the philosophical, political and literary thought. Tracing the transhistorical and transcultural migration of ideas and motifs from Timurid Central Asia to Mughal India, my paper examines the transference of Sufi thought on image-making practices, particularly portraiture, in the imperial court of the Mughals in early seventeenth century.