Book
Lalla Essaydi - Beyound Time and Beauty
The Baku Museum of Modern Art has opened its doors to Lalla Essaydi’s Beyond Time and Beauty exhibition. Beyond Time and Beauty is Essaydi’s first exhibition in Azerbaijan and follows her retrospective at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in 2012-13. Bringing together works from across her career, the show features the series Harem, Bullets, Converging Territories and Les Femmes du Maroc. As the curator, Dina Nasser-Khadivi, describes “Essaydi is a remarkable international artist; she navigates pervasive cultural and aesthetic dichotomies to make something wholly original - East and West, Tradition and Modernity and the changing perceptions of women.” A fully illustrated colour catalogue will accompany the exhibition and include an essay by Olga Nefedova, the founding director at the Orientalist Museum, Qatar. Essaydi was raised in Morocco and spent many years in Saudi Arabia, and although she was educated in Europe and the United States, this experience of traditional Islamic life was fundamental in shaping her. Essaydi’s photography provides a contemporary reflection on an iconography that stretches as far back as the Orientalist imagery of nineteenth century artists such as Ingres, Delacroix, and Gérôme. More recently Essaydi has produced a series of pictures in a former harem in Morocco, often swathing her subjects in robes which closely echo the decorative tiles that wall the complex. Lalla Essaydi lives in New York. Selections from her series Les Femmes du Maroc were published by powerHouse Books in 2009. Recent exhibitions of her work have been staged at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Williams College Museum, Williamstown, Mass.; and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Her work is represented in the collections of the Louvre, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles; Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and many others
Iran has remained one of the most effective tools in Russia's foreign policy towards the West for more than two hundred years. Drawing on previously unpublished and recently declassified sources which change the established wisdom on many aspects of the history of Russia and Iran, Denis V. Volkov examines this relationship, and situates it within the broader context of Oriental studies. With a particular focus on the activities of scholars-diplomats, as well as scholars involved in academia, missionary activities and the military within their own professional domains, Volkov analyses the interaction of intellectuals with state structures and their participation in the process of shaping and conducting foreign policy towards Iran. This work explores the specific institutional practices of Russia's Oriental studies, including organisation of scholarly intelligence networks, taking advantage of state power for the promotion of institutional and individual interests, and profound engagement with Russia's domestic and foreign policy discourses of its time.
Joel R. Poinsett is a fascinating, yet forgotten, figure in United States history. He had a long political and diplomatic career as one of the most travelled US officials in the first half of the 19th century. In 1806-1808 he travelled to and through Russia, met Tsar Alexander I, and contrasted in his letters and diary the differences between Russian and American political and social systems. Poinsett also knew the “Oriental Russia”, for he went to the Volga and Caucasus regions. His anecdotes and those of his companion, the British Lord Royston (previously unedited), are extremely interesting as testimonies of Russian Orientalism which are presented here for the first time in over a century.
In September 2012 Christie’s will present ‘Of Sand and Silk’, the first European solo-exhibition of the prominent Russian artist Alexander Volkov (1886-1957). The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue. Volkov was born in the Fergana valley into the family of a Russian military doctor. He achieved significant lifetime recognition for his depictions of Central Asia, his paintings uniquely combining cutting-edge Western painterly styles with the inspiration he drew from traditional Central Asian craftsmanship. Volkov loved his homeland passionately and often repeated: “One does not need the whole world. A small part will suffice”.
This article draws attention to one of the neglected aspects of trolling in current literature: its potential to stand as a form of cultural politics that may inform counter-hegemonic challenges to prevalent ideologies. Rather than merely perceiving trolling as a threat to normality or a proof of the internet’s dystopic character, we look at the ways that certain trolls employ the method of ‘subversive affirmation’ for effectively addressing current events, and to mock hegemonic ideological currents, lifestyles and contexts in Greece today. We argue that the trolls we study are positioned against the hegemonic neoliberal framework and its attempts to achieve consensus on the supposed necessity of austerity reforms and the maintenance of the euro currency, as well as against a prevailing conservativism and nationalism that blend with the broader neoliberal assemblage of discourses, policies and practices in Greek society. By developing a thematic analysis on selected Facebook trolls’ posts, we discuss the ways that trolls function politically, transgressing the limits of the hegemonic discourses and identities, as well as the norms of mediated dialogue, deliberation and critique. The key mechanisms deployed by the trolls are the overlapping practices of over-identification and humour. This article suggests seeing trolling as a form of cultural production that not only damages, but redirects desires, produces identifications and instils passionate investments in political ideologies.
The book discusses the principal aspects of description of the East in the Western scholarly discourse as well as in art and literature. An analysis of the interpretations of the East by the West (and vice versa) and their historical evolution has emerged as especially important in the light of ongoing globalization, which has triggered the intensifi cation of ideological, religious, economic and cultural differences between the East and the West. The goal of the book is to distill a critical understanding of Orientalist / Occidentalist discourses and to question cross-cultural assumptions.
The article begins with contextualising the Russian Empire’s many-fold presence in Persia at the fin de siècle and the condition of Russia’s Persian studies therein. As the results of undertaken archival research support, Russia’s ‘Iranists’ quite often had a crucial impact on the course of international affairs, securing and extending the sphere of Russian imperial influence not only in the Greater Persianate World but also directly affecting the peripeteia of European politics. Thus the article explores Vladimir Minorsky’s early scholarly and professional career as a budding diplomat of Imperial Russia and focuses on his participation in the 1913-1914 activities of the Russo-Brito-Turko-Iranian Quadripartite Boundary Commission, which, exactly one hundred years ago, drew almost 1200 miles of the Iranian present-day western frontier. Finally, the article reveals what implications the outcomes of these activities (whose inspirer was mainly Minorsky) have had for Iran during these hundred years, particularly in relation to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war.
The paper draws on the conceptualisation of the interplay of power/knowledge relations, discourses, and institutional and personal interests. The study of Minorsky’s activities is carried out based on the unpublished materials derived from his private diaries and the testimonies of the British officers who were members of the Commission.
This article examines subjects and decorative sources of orientalism inRussian porcelain ofthe 18th and 19th centuries. It seems important to single out stages ofthe incremental development of orientalist motifs in Russian porcelain and describe their evolution. Additionally, the authors aim to clarify why orientalist motifs were chosen by porcelain collectors and buyers and what role they played in arts and crafts in Russian Empire at different times. The article presents a consistent analysis ofthe evolution of orientalist motifs in 18th–19th centuries Russian porcelain. This study employs methods of formal and stylistic analysis. The use of these methods allows the authors to study the stylistic origins of orientalist motifs answering the question regarding the framework of its stylistic tradition and why a fashion emerged for the motifs described in this research. Furthermore, the researchers use the historical-genetic method trying to trace the emergence and development of the phenomenon of orientalist motifs on the basis of literature, historical sources, and porcelain objects. By applying methods of historical analysis and cultural analysis, this paper investigates and highlights the historical background of the emergence and development of orientalist motifs in Russian porcelain. Additionally, these methods are appropriate to understand how the taste preferences of customers of porcelain in the Russian Empire between the second half ofthe 18th and the 19th centuries influenced the stylistic formation of orientalist motifs.
A major international conference, “Orientalism / Occi dentalism: The Languages of Cultures vs. the Languages of Description”, took place from September 23–25, 2010, in Moscow under the aegis of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research. The goal of the Conference was to discuss the principal aspects of description of the East (fi rst of all Asian but also African cultures) in the Western scholarly discourse as well as in art and literature. The idea of the Conference belonged to the current author who, in the Fall of 2008, enlisted the support of Prof. Kirill Razlogov, Director of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research, as a result of which the Institute played a crucial role in the following two-year preparations
This article does not pretend to criticize or to pay tribute to the theoretical discussion on the nature of colonial knowledge and the way it should be treated. Its main aim is to track the change in a scholar’s methodological approach toward his local assistants that actually affected both sides of this interaction. That was the key factor in the creation of colonial knowledge. Thus, I suggest showing how this interaction was used by both sides for their own benefit and what the strategies and foundations were for that kind of relationship. As the main case for this study, I have chosen Russian Turkologist-encyclopedist Alexander Samoilovich. Almost yearly from 1900 to 1936, Samoilovich attempted to visit regions inhabited by Turkic-speaking groups, and as a result, he was able to form a network of assistants. Therefore, Samoilovich's ideas and self-reflection are crucial for understanding his multiple contacts with the Others and the consequences of these interactions.
On the occasion of Doha being a cultural capital of the Middle East in 2010 and Istanbul being a cultural capital of Europe, Doha Orientalist museum is holding a symbolic exhibition “A Journey into the World of the Ottomans”, accompanied by a catalogue. Major part of the illustrated exhibition artworks are to come from the Orientalist museum own collection, the Rijksmuseum, as well as other major collections. The exhibition will bring together artists from the sixteenth century onwards, including Bernardino Campi, Jacopo Ligozzi, Nicolas Rycks, Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, Jean-Étienne Liotard, Antoine Ignace Melling, Francesco Hayez, John Frederick Lewis, Walter Gould, Alberto Pasini, Germain Fabius Brest, Oskar Kokoschka, Nikolai Kalmikoff, Vanessa Hodgkinson and Bas Princen. The artworks selected are to illustrate the history of the orientalism development from the sixteenth to twenty first century, which throughout the years shaped the image of the Ottoman world in Europe, covering different genres of orientalist art. - See more at: http://www.skira.net/a-journey-into-the-world-of-the-ottomans.html?___store=en&___from_store=default#sthash.V8N9Mye4.dpuf
The article is devoted to the formation of the image of the pre-revolutionary history of Russia on the example of Yuri Tarich's film Wings of Serf (1926). In the first post-revolutionary decade, there was a departure from previous standards in the image of national history. Authors searched for new forms of screen representations of past events. Although the film inherits the tradition of depicting the king as a murderer and tyrant, the creators – director Yuri Tarich and screenwriter Victor Shklovsky – tried to transfer on screen revolutionary understanding of history. The film is influenced
by historical theory of Mikhail Pokrovsky, and Shklovsky introduced the economic element in the scenario as the main engine of the plot.
The avant-garde figures who came to cinema (Shklovsky, first of all, was a literary critic) came up with the rules of screenwriting craft on the go and challenged the boundaries of cinema's possibilities in practice. The purpose of Wings of Serf’s screenplay was to move away from the one-sided image of Ivan the Terrible and determine his actions as of economic basis. Shklovsky and Tarich developed the idea of the revolutionary remaking of the image of the past in their next work, the film version of Captain's Daughter.
The article covers the history of foreign screenings of Wings of Serf, focusing on the history of censorship bans and re-editing of the film for USA. The author shows in the article the possible influence of Wings of Serf on Ivan the Terrible by Sergei Eisenstein, which is implicitly present in both artistic and plot terms.
Despite success and foreign distribution, the movie was visually traditional, realistic, and researchers considered, most often, as the prologue before radical change of the relation to Ivan the Terrible in the thirties. The article shows how filmmakers of the first decade after the revolution used to work with historical material.
This collection of essays was published in a form of a catalogue for one of the propgrams screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Fstival in October 2019. The program entitled "The Creative Treatment of Grierson in Wartime Japan" was co-organized by the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and the National Film Archive of Japan and presented a broad variety of wartime Japanese documentaries as well as British and Soviet films that have influenced them. The collection of essays explores the development of wartime Japanese documentary cinema from variety of historical and theoretical perspectives.
The paper examines a rare explored phenomenon of Soviet cover design –a number of official releases produced by the only recording concern Melodija on the one hand, and so-called “tape-albums” became widespread among underground people in the late Soviet Union, on another.