scholarly journals Parallelotopia: Ottoman transcultural memory assemblages in contemporary art practices from the Middle East

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 493-513
Author(s):  
Gabriel Koureas
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Ethnic Violence ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Etel Adnan ◽  
Dynamic Exchange

This article engages with the conversations taking place in the photographic space between then and now, memory and photography, and with the symbiosis and ethnic violence between different ethnic communities in the ex-Ottoman Empire. It questions the role of photography and contemporary art in creating possibilities for coexistence within the mosaic formed by the various groups that made up the Ottoman Empire. The essay aims to create parallelotopia, spaces in the present that work in parallel with the past and which enable the dynamic exchange of transcultural memories. Drawing on memory theory, the article shifts these debates forward by adopting the concept of ‘assemblage’. The article concentrates on the aesthetics of photographs produced by Armenian photographic studios in Istanbul during the late nineteenth century and their relationship to the present through the work of contemporary artists Klitsa Antoniou, Joanna Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige and Etel Adnan as well as photographic exhibitions organised by the Centre for Asia Minor Studies, Athens, Greece.

Killing Others

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Lange
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Ethnic Violence ◽  
Human History ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Powerful Explanation ◽  
Mind Set

This book explores why humans ruthlessly attack and kill people from other ethnic communities. Drawing on an array of cases from around the world and insight from a variety of disciplines, the book provides a simple yet powerful explanation that pinpoints the influential role of modernity in the growing global prevalence of ethnic violence over the past 200 years. It offers evidence that a modern ethnic mind-set is the ultimate and most influential cause of ethnic violence. Throughout most of human history, people perceived and valued small sets of known acquaintances and did not identify with ethnicities. Through education, state policy, and other means, modernity ultimately created broad ethnic consciousnesses that led to emotional prejudice, whereby people focus negative emotions on entire ethnic categories, and ethnic obligation, which pushes people to attack Others for the sake of their ethnicity. Modern social transformations also provided a variety of organizational resources that put these motives into action, thereby allowing ethnic violence to emerge as a modern menace. Yet modernity takes many forms and is not constant, and past trends in ethnic violence are presently transforming. Over the past seventy years, the earliest modernizers have transformed from champions of ethnic violence into leaders of intercommunal peace, and this book offers evidence that the emergence of robust rights-based democracy—in combination with effective states and economic development—weakened the motives and resources that commonly promote ethnic violence.

Adventism, Apocalyptic, and the Cause of Liberty

1994 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-249
Author(s):  
Douglas Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Conservative Protestantism ◽  
Late Nineteenth

“I have felt like working three times as hard as ever since I came to understand that my Lord was coming back again,” reported revivalist Dwight L. Moody, the most prominent of nineteenth-century premillennialists. Moody's testimony to the motivating power of premillennialism points to the crucial role of that eschatology in conservative Protestantism since the late nineteenth century—a role delineated by several studies within the past twenty-five years. As a comprehensive interpretation of history which gives meaning and pattern to past, present, and future, and a role for the believer in the outworking of the divine program, premillennialism has been a driving force in the fundamentalistand evangelical movements.

Veronicas and Artists

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Religious Images ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way ◽  
Contemporary Artists

Chapter One deals with several central issues with regard to understanding the role of religious motifs in contemporary art. Besides being a repetition of imagery from the past, religious motifs embedded in contemporary artworks become a means to problematise not only the way different periods in the history of art are delimited, but larger and seemingly more rigid distinctions as those between art and non-art images. Early religious images differ significantly from art images. The two types are regulated according to different sets of rules related to the conditions of their production, display, appreciation and the way images are invested with the status of being true or authentic instances of art or sacred images. Chapter One provides a discussion of the important motif of the image not made by an artist’s hand, or acheiropoietos, and its survival and transformation, including its traces in contemporary image-making practices. All images are the result of human making; they are fictions. The way the conditions of these fictions are negotiated, or the way the role of the maker is brought to visibility, or concealed, is a defining feature of the specific regime of representation. While the cult image concealed its maker in order to maintain its public significance, and the later art image celebrated the artist as a re-inventor of the old image, contemporary artists cite religious images in order to reflect on the very procedures that produce the public significance and status of images.

Reverberations of the Armenian Genocide

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Azarian-Ceccato
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Armenian Genocide ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Central California ◽  
The Past ◽  
Diasporic Community ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Point Of Departure

Narrative research has not traditionally examined the intergenerational transmission and reverberation of narratives within ethnic communities, and yet it is through the chain of generations that voices of the past reverberate and testimonies endure which fuel and form present day notions of the past. This article is a call for and an example of the importance ethnographic investigation into communities of memories, for it is through community storytelling that records are set straight as a memorial for victims and survivors. This line of inquiry is pertinent to various communities throughout the world, as we come to see the role of language, and in particular, narrative in the formation of ideas and conflicts, as scholars such as Slyomovics, (1998) have pointed out. This research takes as its point of departure narrative renditions of the Armenian genocide recounted in both public and private venues by the great-grandchildren of genocide survivors in an ethnic enclave in Central California. In this diasporic community we see how communities of memory are formed in a space of mediation which links the new generation with the old, the present with its past as well as with its imagined communities (Anderson, 1983). Through examination of the linguistic reverberations of this historical and familial narrative, I ask what becomes of authorship when collected stories are salient enough to be included in one’s own personal history, and how these narrativizations contribute to one’s sense of self? These questions are answered both by linguistic analysis of pronouns and deixis, as well as through analysis of prevalent themes. The results of this research lend into the historical progression of memory through time by those who did not experience the trauma, but rather were witnesses by listening to the trauma of others.

“Of the New-World a new discoverie”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Gift Book

Chapter 2 analyzes Thomas Gage’s The English-American (1648), which urges Oliver Cromwell to invade New Spain (the “Western Design”). Gage, an English Catholic, lived in New Spain for twelve years, apostasized and returned to England as a Protestant minister, and published accounts of his travels. Gage’s works imagine an alternative history in which England, not Spain, backed Columbus’s explorations and prognosticates a worldwide English empire. He presents himself as a latter-day Columbus, offering the discovery of America to Cromwell in the role of King Henry VII. The coda takes a 1628 document preserved in the British National Archives as a starting point to consider how the Victorian Calendar of State Papers and especially one of its editors (and author of the children’s gift-book Hearts of Oak), W. Noel Sainsbury, made meaning of such materials, establishing “what the past will have meant” in the late nineteenth century and beyond.

Contemporary Art in the Classic Museum: Strategies for a Productive Dialogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-27
Author(s):  
Е.А. Kartseva
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Domestic Institutions ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Specialized Institutions ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Changing Role

A variety of strategies for incorporating contemporary art are found today in almost all world museums. Domestic institutions in recent years have also taken a course on contemporary art, which has become the occasion of numerous discussions. Not all are advocates of such integrations, suggesting that for contemporary art there are specialized institutions. However, with the changing role of the museum in the modern world, the acquisition of new functions, as well as the development of contemporary art practices, classical cultural institutions are less and less able to resist the expansion of contemporary art. The article formulates the advantages and risks of including contemporary art in a classical museum, and offers scenarios for a productive cultural dialogue.

Introduction: Some Recent Approaches to Japanese Nationalism

1971 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth B. Pyle
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Human Race ◽  
The Past ◽  
Old Order ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
Post War ◽  
To Receive

The study of nationalism, the most powerful political emotion in the modern world, has often become enmeshed in polemic and ideological combat. In Japan during the past century, evaluations of the historical role of nationalism have tended to oscillate between extremes. Some of its first serious students in the late nineteenth century, writers like Kuga Katsunan and Miyake Setsurei, opposing the prevalent Westernism, were convinced that nationalism was a necessary ingredient of Japanese survival; and they would have agreed with Tocqueville's aphorism that “the interests of the human race are better served by giving every man a particular fatherland than by trying to inflame his passions for the whole of humanity.” Since 1945, however, in a mood of national self-alienation, many Japanese writers have shared Veblen's turgid conclusion, “Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to lead human institutions to the service of dissension and distress. In its material effects it is altogether the most sinister as well as the most imbecile of all the institutional incumbrances that have come down out of the old order.” Once seen as necessary and beneficial, nationalism came in the post-war period to be villified or simply ignored amidst the scholars' preoccupation with their anti-establishment liberal heroes. With some notable exceptions, nationalism has been slow to receive in Japan the thoughtful, dispassionate study it needs.

scholarly journals Presentism, Public History and Contemporary Russian Art

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galina Yankovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Public History ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Participatory Culture ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
The Past ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of

The article examines typical features of images and themes of the past as they appear in contemporary Russian art, within the context of the presentist regime of historicism and as a part of public history. This research focuses on the works by Mikhail Pavlyukevich and Olga Subbotina, as well as Chaim Sokol, all of them the artists for whom image of the present is determined by the experience of the past as an incomplete process. The analysis focuses on the factors that ground this important place that the past occupies within the space of contemporary art practices. The article explores intersections between history in public space and contemporary art. The author argues that the development of public history rooted in participatory culture, as well as de-monopolisation of expert knowledge and non-academic languages constituting the discourse on the past, shares similarities with many characteristics of contemporary art practices. In these practices the public actively participates in the artistic processes, an artist loses their status as a demiurge, while site-specific character of artistic projects necessarily rests upon the exlporation of the history of place and the immersion in memory. A palimpsest, in which inseparable interpenetrating layers of the past appear through one another, becomes a metaphor both of public history and of one of the trends in contemporary art. Keywords: presentism, public history, contemporary art, Mikhail Pavlyukevich, Olga Subbotina, Chaim Sokol

Introduction Special Section on Contemporary Art and Religion

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Loren Lerner
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Art Making ◽  
The Past ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Art Practices

Abstract This introduction explores the connections between the worlds of art and religion over the past fifty years. Focusing on the discursive coherence of contemporary art and religion, Lerner examines the attempts to bring some order to a theme that has cyclically and persistently arisen in recent art making. In this overview of critical and curatorial interpretations, crucial areas of inquiry are: the religious and secular paradigms addressed within contemporary art practices; the relationships between works of art and institutional questions; the confrontations of new artistic modes; and the survival of religious symbolic structures.

Native American Expressive Arts

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anya Montiel
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Native Art ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Impact

Opening with the life and art of Dakota artist Oscar Howe, the chapter discusses the “Indianness” of Native art and the frustrations experienced by Native artists over the years surrounding their creative expressions. The chapter is arranged chronologically, opening in the late nineteenth century and highlighting sample exhibitions, artworks, and artists from the United States in order to illustrate broad conceptual issues. These include Indian authenticity and identity, differences between fine art and “crafts,” traditional versus contemporary art forms, the role of the arts in economic development, and the impact of federal power on the arts. The chapter draws examples from painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance art. It concludes with a proposal for understanding Native art inspired by the words of Santa Clara artist Rose Simpson.

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