In Defense and Devotion: Affective Practices in Early Modern Islamic Manuscript Paintings

Name: In Defense and Devotion: Affective Practices in Early Modern Islamic Manuscript Paintings
Start: 2023-02-22T13:00:00+02:00
End: 2023-02-22T15:00:00+02:00
Location: Alwaleed Hall - PO71

by Public and Community Events

Academic

Wed, Feb 22, 2023

1 PM – 3 PM (GMT+2)

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Alwaleed Hall - PO71

AUC Avenue, P.O. Box 74, New Cairo, 11835, Egypt

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While several studies have tackled the question of iconoclasm in Islam, extant paintings reveal that the practice of viewing and responding to images in Muslim lands are much more varied than previously thought. Pre-modern pictorial evidence instead suggests that there existed a range of motivations behind viewers' engagement with and manipulation of pictorial images. Such interactions highlight the complex confluences between emotive and visual expressions during a painted image's inception and the afterlife. From inserted iconographic motifs to the performance of symbolic destruction in pre-modern Islamic manuscript paintings, it becomes clear that affective engagements that eventually resulted in pigment damage could act as pictorially articulated responses in both defense of and devotion to figural representations. As a result, altered images invite us to radically rethink received scholarly paradigms so that evidence that is most frequently interpreted as a form of Islamic iconoclasm may, at least in some cases, provide clues to Islamic iconophilic practices instead.

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Speakers

Christiane Gruber

Professor

University of Michigan

Christiane Gruber’s primary field of research is Islamic book arts, paintings of the Prophet Muhammad, and Islamic ascension texts and images, about which she has written two books and edited a volume of articles. She also pursues research in Islamic book arts and codicology, having authored the online catalogue of Islamic calligraphies in the Library of Congress as well as edited the volume of articles, The Islamic Manuscript Tradition. Her third field of specialization is modern Islamic visual culture and post-revolutionary Iranian visual and material culture, about which she has written several articles. She also has co-edited two volumes on Islamic and cross-cultural visual cultures. She recently completed her third book, titled The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images.

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