The Institute for Advanced Study at CEU is pleased to invite you to the first lecture in the Institute`s Wednesday Seminars

Yuka Kadoi
Senior Core Fellow at IAS CEU

Wednesday, 12 October, 11:00 a.m.
Nádor u. 15, Room 103 (Tiered Room) and online

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and during the rise of radical terrorism in the early 2000s, a number of cultural institutions worldwide, particularly those with the adjective “Islamic” in their names, became engaged in a growing sociological and historiographical debate about the function and meaning of the display genre called “Islamic art”. Around the same time a number of Euro-American museums have embarked on remodelling their decades-old gallery configurations for seeking compromised, if not ideal, display modes of Islamic art collections, whereas it has become increasingly argued among cultural critics, sociologists and politicians alike that both public and private museums should be designed to offer opportunities for wide public engagement with their collections for a better understanding of “Muslim” – rather than western-defined “Islamic” – cultural heritage. To what extent can fragmental archaeological finds, restored objects and detached manuscript painting pages be installed as the unified image of Muslim civilisation within a self-contained space? How can such decontextualised objects speak for themselves? And how do they reflect current politics of representation in the midst of global transformations? This talk overviews the history, culture and politics of representations in the field of Islamic art and architecture from around 2000 to the present. By surveying a 20-year debate concerning the display genre of “Islamic art” that has so far been centred in West Europe and North America, this talk will seek an alternative avenue to put this contentious debate into Central European museum contexts.
 

Yuka Kadoi is an art historian and cultural theorist, with particular expertise in the mobility of artefacts, history of collecting, art historiography and critical museology. Currently Project Leader at the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies, Department of Art History, University of Vienna, sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), she has published extensively on various aspects of Muslim cultural heritage in global contexts. She is the author of Islamic Chinoiserie: The Art of Mongol Iran (EUP, 2009) and more than fifty book chapters and journal articles, as well as the editor / co-editor of six volumes and three special issues of peer-reviewed journals. She is currently finalising the manuscript of her second monograph (under contract with EUP), which deals with the early twentieth-century history and historiography of Persian art. She had completed a BA in Sinology in Kyoto, before moving to Scotland, where she expanded her research horizon into Islamic and Middle Eastern studies and obtained a MSc (2000) and a PhD (2005), both in History of Art, at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to her return to the Scottish academia, where she served as a founding member of the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World at the University of Edinburgh (2012-14), she had worked as curator at several cultural institutions worldwide, such as the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar (2007-8), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2008-11), USA. She has held visiting professorships, including the Lebanese American University in Beirut (2015-16) and the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka (2018), as well as competitive fellowships (e.g., IASH/University of Edinburgh [2005-6]; SAS/University of London [2007]; CASVA/National Gallery of Art [2015]).

RSVP

Agnes Bendik at bendikag@ceu.edu
 

AGNES BENDIK
Senior Administrative Officer

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