Discourses of preservation focus on issues of the physical maintenance, access to, dissemination, and restitution of works deemed to have scientific, historical, and/or cultural value. Yet categorizations of value, as well as the discourses through which objects circulate, are themselves never neutral. In content, genre, and rhetoric, they reflect the interests of modern beneficiaries and partake in the construction of circuits of capitalist value.
Inspired by the description of the Simurgh’s feather in the epic poem The Conference of the Birds (1177) by Farid al-Din Attar, this paper makes both a formal and a practical intervention in how exhibition might function as a means of communicating through Islamic thought. First, it learns from the poetic modality of speech dominant in pre-modern cultures to rethink the role of pleasure, memory, and sound in articulating the meaning of objects and their display. Secondly, it learns from the content of pre-modern poetry to think of preservation as a dynamic rather than a static practice, always dependent on ritual, physical, and incorporative renewal to retain contemporary vitality. It suggests that decolonization requires not only material interventions in systems of object preservation, but also epistemic interventions in the circulation of meaning through and around objects. Loosely structured through hendecasyllabic meter harkening to pre-modern Latin education in Europe, the text deploys formats of reference and citation common in academic prose.
Wendy Miriam Kural Shaw (PhD 1999, University of California, Los Angeles) served as professor in departments of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Media Studies, and Art History in the United States, Turkey, Switzerland and Germany. Her initial interest in the transcultural recycling of art and its institutions under paradigms of Westernization and secularization in modern Turkey developed into an examination of Islamic discourses of perception as a source for decolonized expression. Liberated from the disciplinary mandate of universities since the end of her position as Professor of Islamic Art at the Free University Berlin in 2021, she continues to explore the interface between culture and religion. She is author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (University of California Press, 2003), Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (IB Tauris, 2011), What is “Islamic” Art: Between Religion and Perception (Cambridge University Press, 2019, Honorable Mention for the 2020 Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association and the 2021 Iran Book Award), and Loving Writing: Techniques for the University and Beyond (Routledge, 2021). She currently writes and illustrates short and long footnoted fiction and verse.
Çiçek İlengiz works at the intersection of heritage studies, the anthropology of emotions, and memory studies. She compleated her PhD in 2019 at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin. Her doctoral research explored how genocidal violence is translated into collective memory, radical political imaginations, and practices of healing in the Kurdish region of Turkey. She is currently working on her second book project, Rooting into the World: Inheriting Love, Lack and Failure in Anatolia, which examines the affective politics of the World Heritage regime in contemporary Turkey. Bringing together case studies from cultural, intangible, and environmental heritage, the project asks the question “How does one inherit what is supposedly belonging to everyone?". Her recent publications engage with the conceptual discussions on inheritance, temporality, and commemoration. She is a member of the editorial collective of Allegra Laboratory: Anthropology for Radical Optimism.
This event will be held in a hybrid format. For in-person attendance, please register in via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. For online participation, please note the login details for Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/97208137276?pwd=fSGwk3oJEQiALbEPcDlO8g9slqsUb6.1
Meeting ID: 972 0813 7276
Passcode: 430986
The event is part of the conversation series Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm of the BEYONDREST Research Group. “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) is an ERC-funded, five-year research project at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Project No. 101045661). More information on the project and the conversation series can he found here.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the speaker(s) and author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union, nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
