HIAA Biennial Symposium
Regionality: Looking for the Local in the Arts of Islam
The Courtauld Institute of Art
London
10.20-10.20.16
The Fifth Biennial Conference of the Historians of Islamic Art Association celebrates the European ‘roots’ of the study of the arts that fall under the cultural umbrella of Islam, and the formation of the important early collections and exhibitions that launched its scholarship. Those early, mostly connoisseurial categories of regional types and styles – the “Moresque”, Persian painting, Turkish tiles, Indian decorative arts – formed the foundations from which universalizing narratives of “Islamic” arts emerged, especially in the period after the Second World War. Some fifty years later, we are witnessing a resurgence of the study of regional specificities, augmented with deeper research into the diverse facets of any given locality or artistic form, and a greater commitment to the linguistic and cultural particularities that shaped the arts, architecture and archaeology in a specific locale. Rigorous application of trans-disciplinary research strategies have contributed to the deepening of our understanding of the arts of Islam in local terms, and have allowed us to embrace broader historical trajectories to include the modern and contemporary in our field.
10.20.16
18:15-18:30
Welcome Remarks: Deborah Swallow, Professor and Director, The Courtauld Institute of Art and Sheila Canby, HIAA president
18:30-19:30
Keynote
Images Incomplete: Prescriptive Piety as Material Practice in Islamic Art
Finbarr Barry Flood
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities, Institute of Fine Arts and College of Arts and Sciences
19:30-20:30
Drinks reception
10.21.16
10:00-12:00
Workshop
Object viewing sessions at the British Museum, British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum
12:00-14:00
Lunch break and return to The Courtauld
14:00-15:30
Panel
Responses to the Antique World in Islam
Simon O’Meara
Chair
Nadia Ali
Early Islamic Art, Local Micro-Identities and Everyday Religiosity in the pre-Modern Syrian Countryside
Lindsay Allen
Contested Ruins:The Stratigraphy of Islamic Marginalia at Takht-i Jamshid/Persepolis
Lev Arie Kapitaikin
A Sense of Place and Grace: The Great ‘Zitouna’ Mosque of Tunis, a Font of Tunisian Architecture
Antony Eastmond
Discussant
15:30-16:00
Tea & Coffee
04:00-17:30
Panel
Locality of Style in Turco-Persian Manuscripts
Zeynep Yürekli-Görkay
Chair
Cailah Jackson
The Illuminations of Mukhlis ibn ‘Abdullah al-Hindi: A Local Style of Late Thirteenth-Century Konya
Alya Karame
The Illumination ofthe Imperial Ghaznavid Qur’ans: A Distinct Local Style
Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp
Heroes of Legend, Heroes of History: Militant Manuscripts of the Shaybanid Uzbeks in Transoxiana
Elaine Wright
Discussant
18:00-19:00
Keynote
'Fings ain’t wot they oughto be’: Making Things & the Art History of Early & Medieval Islamic Societies
Jeremy Johns
Director of the Khalili Research Centre; Professor of the Art & Archaeology of the Islamic Mediterranean; Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford University
19:00-20:00
Drinks Reception
10.22.16
09:30-11:00
Panel
State Control of City and Landscape
Julia Gonnella
Chair
Stéphane Pradines
Regional Patterns in Fatimid Military Architecture
Paul Wordsworth
Styling the saray: Central Asian Traditions in Early Seljuq Architectural Grammar
Abbey Stockstill
Under the Atlas: Visibility and Materiality in the Landscape of Almohad Marrakesh
Scott Redford
Discussant
11:00-11:30
Tea & Coffee
11:30-13:00
Panel
Local/Translocal Dialogues through the Arts of the Book
Anna Contadini
Chair
Jake Benson
The Qit’at-i Khushkhatt Album and Mir Muhammad Tahir
Keelan Overton
Between Herat, Bijapur and Mysore: The Timurid Qur’an of Abu Sa‘id
Melis Taner
An Illustrated Genealogy Between the Ottomans and Safavids
Ünver Rüstem
Discussant
13:00-14:30
Lunch
14:30-16:00
Panel
Mediated Identities in Early Modern South Asian Architecture
Ebba Koch
Chair
Munazzah Akhtar
Identity in Death: Expression of Identities in Samma Monuments of Makli Necropolis at Thatta
Fatima Quraishi
Banna’i, Chinoiserie and Carved Sandstone:Mediating Between East and West in Early Modern Sindh
Peyvand Firouzeh
Scribing and Inscribing for the Sufis: Calligraphy, Sufism,and Dynastic Identity in Fifteenth-Century Bidar
D. Fairchild Ruggles
Discussant
16:00-16:30
Tea & Coffee
16:30-18:00
Panel
The Specificities of Modernity
Ruba Kana’an
Chair
Margaret Graves
Markets, Makers and Anxious Administrators: Ceramics and Craft Fidelity in Early Twentieth-Century Morocco
Holly Shaffer
‘The Sky is so Profusely Illuminated’
Alex Dika Seggerman
What is Egyptian Modernism?
Mercedes Volait
Discussant
18:00-18:15
Short break
18:15-19:00
Keynote
Modernism as (a)Politics: Religious Minorities and the Discourse on Architecture in Pahlavi Iran
Talinn Grigor
Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History, University of California, Davis
19:00-19:30
Panel
Celebrating Prof. Doris Behrens-Abouseif
19:30-21:00
Drinks and Tapas Reception at Fernandes & Wells, Somerset House
10.23.16
10:00-15:00
Workshop
Special visit to the Sarikhani Collection or self-organized visit to Power and protection: Islamic art and the supernatural, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; 20 October 2016 - 15 January 2017
Registration
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