“AFRICAN MUSLIMS IN BRAZIL AND LATIN AMERICA: AN ANTERIOR HISTORY”

Michael Gomez, NYU
Margarita Rosa, Princeton University

Wednesday, February 3rd, 12:30-2.30pm ET [Online] Silsila Spring 2021 Lecture Series, Translations

A du’a (supplication) found in the possession of a Black Muslim named Antonio and confiscated by the state after the 1835 Malê revolt. Courtesy of the Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia. Image by Tom Lança, 2018.

Michael Gomez
African Muslims in the New World: A Context

Abstract: This talk is prefatory in nature and intended to provide context for the main presentation. With that said, it is an overview of the Muslim presence in the Americas through the nineteenth century. Depending upon the place and period, that presence could be significant and impactful. Largely associated with Africans, free and enslaved, Islam has long been in the Americas, going back to the days of Columbus.

Michael Gomez is currently Silver Professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and the director of NYU’s newly-established Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD), having served as the founding director of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) from its inception in 2000 to 2007. He is also series editor of the Cambridge Studies on the African Diaspora, Cambridge University Press. He has chaired the History departments at both NYU and Spelman College, and also served as President of UNESCO’s International Scientific Committee for the Slave Route Project from 2009 to 2011. (Complete bio available here)
 

Margarita Rosa
African Muslims and the Du’as of the 1835 Slave Revolt

Abstract: Enslaved Black Muslims in Brazil organized a revolt that is one of the best recorded in the history of the Black Atlantic. What is most astounding about this revolt, launched on the 27th night of Ramadan in 1835, is that it was organized in secret madrasas all across the state of Bahia. Throughout this presentation, Rosa will explore the du’as (supplications or prayers) they left behind and the legacy of struggle they carved out for generations to come. 

Margarita Rosa is a scholar of slavery and a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. Her research is on the legal history of slavery and carcerality, through which she explores the precarious lives of enslaved and incarcerated women, in particular. Rosa works closely with Dr. Jennifer Morgan, Professor of History within the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Rosa’s early doctoral research is on enslaved Muslims in Latin America, with an emphasis on the manuscripts and archival fragments left behind by enslaved Muslim scholars and their students. She currently holds the Jacobus Dissertation Fellowship at Princeton University. 

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Center for Religion and Media, and Department of Religious Studies.Date: Wednesday, February 3rd
Time: 12:30-2:30pm
Location: Online

This event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:30pm ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link:
https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_d-2jgsYTSOKdJAUmIO4pfQ
Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.

SHOW ONE: Thesis Projects by Tisch Photography and Imaging Seniors on view in the Kimmel Windows

Andres Guerrero

 Shina Tser-Shiuan Peng

The first of three exhibitions of thesis projects from the Class of 2021 opens January 28th, 2021 in the window vitrines of the Kimmel Center  located at 60 Washington Square South, New York, NY, 10003.

SHOW ONE is an exhibition featuring works in photography, digital imaging, and multimedia by 11 graduating seniors from the Class of 2021 in New York University’s Department of Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts.

SHOW ONE is the first in a series of three BFA exhibitions of the work of the entire graduating Photography & Imaging class. It is installed in the 13 sidewalk-facing window vitrines of the Kimmel Center and will remain on view through March 1st, 2021.

Opening today: Grey Matters at the Nicholas Hall Gallery, with exhibition essay by Professor Dennis Geronimus

Today Grey Matters goes on view at Nicholas Hall Gallery, New York. Presenting over twenty works from the Renaissance, the exhibition is centered on a series of rare surviving examples of grisaille paintings by Jacopo da Pontormo, which includes a fascinating new discovery of Adam and Eve. 

Several American museums, including the Morgan Library and Museum, have supported the exhibition with loans. Besides a total of seven paintings and drawings by Pontormo, featured works include paintings and graphic examples by Agnolo Bronzino, Giorgio Vasari, Baccio Bandinelli, Giovanni Mansueti, as well as objects in stained glass and Limoges enamel. Several of the paintings will be seen for the first time since their recent conservation. Written by Prof. Dennis Geronimus, a thirteen-chapter original study on Pontormo grisailles is published in conjunction with the exhibition and is available online via the gallery site. An accompanying livestream event “Into the Light” will take place this Friday, Jan. 29th at noon EST . 

Grey Matters is open by appointment until 27 February. You are invited to browse the digital catalogue and visit the exhibition in person! 

Nicholas Hall Gallery

17 East 76th Street (between Madison & 5th Ave)
New York, NY 10021
212 772 9100 (visits by appt.)
info@nicholashjhall.com

“TELLING STORIES: THE ART OF NARRATION IN THE WORK OF KATIA KAMELI”

Katia Kameli, Artist
Omar Berrada, Independent Scholar
Finbarr Barry Flood, Silsila/NYU

Wednesday, January 27th, 12:30pm ET

[Online] Silsila Spring 2021 Lecture Series, Translations

Still from The Storyteller, 2012, HD Video, 12”. © Katia Kameli, ADAGP

The practice of translation is central to the work ofKatia Kameli, a Franco-Algerian artist and director. In this event, the artist will present several of her recent works, which explore entangled histories and practices of translation between cultures and temporalities across textual, verbal and visual media. In The Storyteller (2012), a story teller from the Djemaa al-Fna, the great plaza of Marrakech, narrates a tragic rollercoaster tale of loss, misfortune and friendship according to the conventions of traditional Arab storytelling. Spellbound by the power of his oration, we come to realize that the charismatic raconteur is in fact narrating the 1964 Hindi film Dosti (Friendship). Inhabiting the space between visual and verbal story-telling, the experience of the viewer/listener oscillates between the enchantment of modern technologies of entertainment and forms of narration that long preceded and still inhabit them. Excerpts from the second of Kameli’s work to be shown, Stream of Stories Chapters 5 & 6 (2018-2019) engage the transmission and translation of Indian tales to the west long before the era of the moving image. Stream of Stories concerns the animal fables known in Sanskrit as the Panchatantra and in Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, tales of entertainment and moral edification. Transmitted to Iran in the pre-Islamic period, the tales enjoyed enormous success, translated into most languages, and provided the basis for the animal tales of the seventeenth-century French author La Fontaine. Stream of Stories explores the various appropriations and displacements through which the tales traveled and were transformed, including the many copies of the manuscripts containing them and the visual mediations performed by their illustrations. In Kameli’s work, the multiple engagements with practices of transmission and transmutation that are both dependent upon and transcend language parse different facets of an age-old question: the nature of translation itself.The presentation of Katia Kameli’s work will be accompanied by a discussion between the artist, Omar Berrada, a translator and art critic, and Finbarr Barry Flood, an art historian.  Katia Kameli is a French-Algerian artist. Kameli’s work is closely linked to her personal experience of dual identities, exploring multiplicity and the ‘in-between’. Through video, photography, installation, she investigates intercultural spaces, intersecting identities and their construction. Thus, she positions herself as a hybrid, using a ‘third space’ that enables the emergence of other visions, forms and positions. This ‘third space’ questions historical accounts and can generate a critical stance that allows for the rewriting of hegemonic narratives. Her most recent solo-exhibitions include: The Algerian Novel, Kalmar konstmuseum, Kalmar (2020); She Rekindled the vividness of the past, Kunsthalle Münster, Münster (2019); Ya Rayi, Centre d’art La Passerelle, Brest (2018); À l’ombre de l’étoile et du croissant, CRP/ Centre régional de la photographie des Hauts de France (2018); What Language Do You Speak Stranger, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2016). Kameli has participated in numerous groups shows that include: Global(e) Resistance, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020) ; A toi appartient le regard (…), Quai Branly, Paris (2020); Un instant avant le monde, Biennale de Rabat (2018); Made in Algeria, Mucem, Marseille (2016); Entry Prohibited to Foreigners, Havre Magasinet, Boden, Sweden (2015); Lubumbashi Biennale, Congo (2013); Dak’art, Dakar Biennale (2012; 2018); Higher Atlas, Marrakech Biennale (2012); Bamako Biennale, Mali (2011). In 2006 and 2011, Kameli directed and produced ‘Bledi in Progress’ and ‘Trans-Maghreb’ video platforms for young filmmakers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in Algiers. In spring 2021 Kameli will have a solo exhibition entitled Elle a allumé le vif du passé at the Fonds régional d’art contemporain PACA in Marseille.  Omar Berrada is a writer, translator, and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of Clonal Hum, a book of poems on “invasive species” (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including Album – Cinémathèque de Tanger, a multilingual volume about film in Tangier and Tangier on film (2012), and La Septième Porte, Ahmed Bouanani’s posthumous history of Moroccan cinema (2020). His writing was published in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, and The University of California Book of North African Literature. Currently living in New York, he teaches at The Cooper Union where he co-organizes the IDS Lecture Series. Finbarr Barry Flood is director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. He teaches and publishes on intercultural dimensions of Islamic art, image theory, devotional art, technologies of representation, modernity and Orientalism. Publications include Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (2009) and Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’islam: pèlerins, reliques, copies (2019). He is currently completing a book project, provisionally entitled Islam and Image: Contested Histories, which formed the basis of the 2019 Slade Lectures at the University of Oxford. Co-sponsored by NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, South Asia NYU & the New York Center for Global Asia.Date: Wednesday, January 27th Time: 12:30-2:30pm Location: OnlineThis event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:30pm ET (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ROWkOiXrQSyLHkqULqsZbQ Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at: http://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/research-centers/silsila.html

Meltdown: Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy coauthored by Meredith Martin!

Professor Meredith Martin has just published this co-authored book related to an exhibition she is curating at The New York Public Library (opening in September 2021). Her publisher created this cool trailer for the book.

Call for Papers – Undergraduate Symposium

(Re)connecting…

The History of Art Students’ Association (HASA) at the University of Toronto is pleased to open the call for papers for our Seventh Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium!

The theme of this year’s symposium is “(Re)Connecting”.

Many of us probably feel now, more than ever, the need for connection. A need to witness, feel, and understand the spaces within and between ourselves, others, and the world around us. Art is unique in its ability to foster and propagate connection despite limitations of space or time. Artists, artworks, material culture and museum/gallery spaces exist as spaces of connection, be it through individuals or collectives. This year’s theme invites exploration into the ways that art does not exist inside a vacuum. We pose the questions: how do connections exist in the matrix of art, and how does art (re)connect us in the absence of connection?

Submissions can broadly consider relationships between artists and/or art movements or focus on particular artworks or objects and their meaning/reception. One might consider how many artists formed groups with others whose ideologies they connected to, like Der Blaue Reiter, and others joined guilds for economic means. Some artists do not conform to a single movement, like Pablo Picasso, and thus are set apart by their disconnection. A work might articulate individual religious or spiritual relationships, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1810), or it may communicate relationships in a larger religious institution, like Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, commissioned by the Catholic church. Some connections are formed over great periods in time, like how some art movements share the same influences; the Renaissance and Neoclassicism modelled their principles on the Greco-Roman world. Naturally, others are reactions to previous artistic forms; we can see this in Neo-Dada and Post-Impressionism. Others have foreign contemporaries, like Cubism and Futurism. Other questions worth considering include; Where do artists draw their influences? How do nationalism and religion affect artistic styles and movements? How do artists modify and evolve their style in order to adapt to different movements? How do we account for moments of connection that are exploitative, like in the appropriation of a non-Western culture’s material culture for art by prominent artists?

Our hopes for this theme are to spark consideration into art’s influence on and place within connections, whatever form they may take. We invite students to submit papers that explore topics relating to this theme. Ideas might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Art historical periods, and their shared influences and connectedness
• Identity; regions and cultures
• Ideas of disconnection and isolation
• Community and individuality; academies, mentors, and mentees
• Nationalism and xenophobia
• Relations between artists, groups, and movements
• Interdisciplinary arts: interrelation of visual arts, literature, and music
• Imitation, appropriation, and plagiarism

This symposium aims to create a supportive environment in which undergraduate art historians can challenge their fields of interest and explore research as a community. We ask for papers that show a high degree of independent thinking and that may discuss any period in the art-historical timeline. We welcome papers that take religious and/or historical approaches just as much as those that explore the theme in a literal and/or a postmodern framework.

Submission Requirements:

We invite papers ranging from approximately 1,500–2,500 words (not including footnotes and bibliography) on an issue related to the symposium theme. Longer papers can be considered on a case by case basis. Papers can be excerpts from larger works or separate independent pieces but must have a strong thesis and be well supported with primary and secondary material. Papers will be published in Chicago style, so it is strongly encouraged that your submission conforms to this from the beginning. Interested students must submit their full paper and include a brief abstract (max. 250 words) to this form (https://forms.gle/gJeC4eUX6AAuJocKA) by 11:59 pm on Monday, January 11, 2021.

Please include “HASA 2021 Symposium” with your name as your subject line. On your title page, you should include your name, institution, year of study, paper’s title (or working title), course or supervisor, the grade received (optional), and approximate length of the paper, followed by your abstract. Everything should be in a single attachment as a document or pdf file. Our final selection of papers will be decided by Sunday, January 25, 2021.

Due to the current circumstances regarding COVID-19, this symposium will be hosted virtually over Zoom on March 13, 2021. If you do not reasonably expect to be able to present at the virtual symposium on this date, please refrain from submitting.

We will not be distributing hard copies of the published journal as it will instead exist as an open access Ebook available for download. A full program will be available and emailed to the speakers once decisions have been finalized. It will also be posted on our website: https://arthistoryutoronto.wixsite.com/hasa.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to connect with us at hasa.uoft@gmail.com.