SOAS Art & Archaeology Postgraduate Symposium
Wednesday 3rd June in B102, Brunei Building, SOAS
Session One 9.45-10.45
Alison Ohta – Bindings of the late Mamluk period: technique and style.
The bindings of the late Mamluk period, particularly those produced during the reigns of the sultans Qāytbāy (1468-1496/873-901) and Qānsūh al-Ghawrī (1501-1516/906-922), are particularly interesting for two reasons: firstly, there is innovation in the introduction of new techniques and styles particularly in the use of filigree work and panel stamping, and secondly in their relationship with Timurid, Turcoman and Ottoman bindings. It was these styles and techniques that were to influence the binders of Renaissance Italy who were looking for a new type of binding for manuscripts that celebrated the revival of classical literature and differed from the traditional all-over patterns with the use of multiple stamps. This paper will provide a brief survey of binding styles and techniques of the late Mamluk period tracing relationships with Timurid, Turcoman and Ottoman bindings and finally, showing how these were adopted and adapted by European binders.
Emily Shovelton- Traces of the now-lost Delhi Sultanate school of painting in a fifteenth century illustrated Khamsa of Nizami?
Following the collapse of the Delhi Sultanate in 1398 a number of Muslim Sultanate states held sway in India until arrival of the Mughals in 1526. This period in Indo-Islamic history has only in recent decades been recognized for its contribution to the art of the book. This paper will focus on an illustrated Khamsa of Nizami produced in the north Indian subcontinent during the latter half of the fifteenth century. After a summary of the contextual analysis, I will argue that the manuscript provides tantalizing hints of the now-lost Delhi Sultanate school of painting.
Session Two 11.00-12.30
Katrin Schulze - Research Notes on Contemporary Visual Culture in Northern Nigeria: Some Religious Colour Prints from Kano.
In July 2008 the Kano based researcher Nura Ibrahim introduced me to the traders of religious commodities at Kurmi Market in Kano, Nigeria. Only recently had I become aware of several murals in the city’s old town, now I was presented with a variety of religious posters and prints depicting locally and internationally respected religious scholars using a variety of techniques and styles. They boldly contradicted everything my literature review had suggested about contemporary arts in northern Nigeria. Islam, as the regionally predominant religion, most authors argued, had prevented the development of any meaningful artistic traditions. Figurative, let alone religious figurative arts were unfeasible according to these accounts. In particular a set of simple, locally produced prints depicting scenes and personalities from Quranic narrative and Muslim history, however, raises further questions about the impact of religion and religious arts upon popular visual culture, the adaptation or conservation of imported cultural traits as well as varying concepts of creativity. This paper will present an analysis of some of these prints as a point of departure to explore some of these questions.
Farouk Yahya- A form of Malay divination: the Five Times (Ketika Lima)
Among Malay manuscripts on magic and divination from the 19thto early 20thcentury one of the most common objectives of divination is to determine auspicious or inauspicious times. One particular method is the Five Times (Ketika Lima), where, in a five-day cycle, each day is divided into five time periods. Each time period is governed by a watch, or ruling power, that determines the outcomes of actions and events. This method seems to be ubiquitous in Malay divination: I have found it in over 40 out of 168 manuscripts. This paper will show how this method of divination has been portrayed in Malay manuscripts, using a number of manuscripts as examples. Whilst the five-day cycle appears to be an indigenous Southeast Asian construct, the watches may comprise Hindu deities and Islamic prophets and angels. This paper will therefore also explore how this method represents a blending of different traditions.
Sophie Mew – Museum Spaces and Local Audiences: case studies from Mali and Ghana
My research project is a comparative study of the national museums of Mali and Ghana, West Africa. The countries’ museums took shape in the early 1920s under colonial rule. The colonial legacies still associated with these institutions have led individuals to re-evaluate the role of the museum according to a closer adherence to local audiences’ perceived needs.
This paper draws upon two case studies outside the National Museums, where projects have been undertaken to reach out to local audiences. The first example is the Cultural Bank in Fombori (Mali), where residents deposit their own objects at the museum in exchange for a micro-credit loan. Profits from the Cultural Bank are fed back into the community via literacy or soap-making classes. The second example addresses efforts undertaken by staff at the Volta Regional Museum in Ghana where outreach projects include classes for local high school dropouts.
The varying success of involving local communities is positioned alongside the abilities or inabilities of National Museums to fulfil similar roles – located within densely populated and urban milieus, the difficulties facing them are therefore more complex. This work questions to what extent National Museums are, in fact, able to cater to all publics.
Session Three 1.30-3.30
Chien Li-kuei - Crafting a Deity of One’s Own:Siwei Bodhisattva in Sixth Century Hebei China
This paper presents a fresh approach to study the Buddhist iconography, banjia siwei xiang半跏思惟像, during its last phase of development in China's Hebei province. This image first appeared in Gandhara in the second century and was transmitted to China in the third century; by the end of the sixth century it was found throughout Northern China, Korea and Japan. The contemplating bodhisattva image reached its final stage of development and peak of popularity during the mid-sixth century in Hebei. In that period, it is usually carved as a sculpture in the round, positioned as a central figure in a niche. Moreover, an independent identity for this image emerged, which has been the focus of several studies on this icon. These studies have devoted much attention to the textual origins of the image, and have inevitably treated the images merely as an illustration or appendage to the texts.
This paper first examines the ambiguous uses of the term siwei in Buddhist sutras, in which siwei does not primarily refer to a specific deity. Second, it analyses the formula of the dedicating inscriptions and reveals the ways in which artisans and patrons understood this figure. Third, it discusses the dialogue between the images and the texts, and highlights the possibility that the iconographic tradition of the siwei image acquired its own terminology, and may in turn have influenced the practice of sutra translation.
Yashaswini Chandra - The Changing Buddhist Landscape of the Western Himalayas
Monasteries have been at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist society. This paper will focus on the changing Buddhist landscape of the Western Himalayas, as exemplified by monastic sites. The changes in the architecture, location and context of monasteries are symptomatic of changing historical processes, and such a discussion allows insights into the dynamic history of this region from the 10th to 21st century.
The earliest monasteries in the Western Himalayas were usually located in valleys along the trade routes of high Asia, doubling as caravanserais and avenues for tax collection. Profits from trade and agriculture, in turn, funded monasteries. As Western Tibetan kingdoms increasingly became targets for armies from Tibetan areas, northern Indian regions and Central Asia, the monasteries began to be mounted, often alongside fortresses, on hills, brooding over the villages at their feet. This change in appearance and location is also symptomatic of the strengthened relation between religion and politics in the Tibetan regions from the later medieval period onwards.
The contemporary changes to the Buddhist landscape of the Western Himalayas also speak of a changing historical context. Modern events resulted in the incorporation of parts of Western Tibet into modern India while other parts of the region, along with the rest of Tibet, were occupied by China. In the context of the former, monasteries often reflect an attempt to replicate traditional Tibetan aesthetics while using materials and techniques popular across India. This survey of the changing Buddhist landscape of the Western Himalayas will be based on examples of monasteries from across the region. The conceptual premise to the paper entails emphasis on material heritage, including even the experience of a landscape, as a key source with reference to the wider history of a region.
Terumi Toyama - The Great Buddha in Japan's Capitals
In this paper I will discuss the replication and meaning of great Buddhas in the major cities of Japan. The Great Buddha (Daibutsu) in Japanese capitals, such as Nara, Kyoto and Tokyo will be discussed in order to understand how the image of the Great Buddha was used, understood and consumed by different authorities. Both religious and political perspectives are used in order to understand and analyse images of the Great Buddha, dating from the 8th century to the 17th century.
Doreen Mueller - Two Documentary Paintings of the Tenpō Era Famine (1833-39): Disaster Past and Present
This paper will discuss two paintings that can be termed documentary painting (Kirokuga). They record in image and text the severe famine of the Tenpō Era (1830-44) that lasted from 1833 to 1839. Both paintings take the format of the handscroll and document the famine from the perspective of relief efforts in Kyoto.
Tanaka Yūbi (1839-1933), cousin and student of the Fukkō Yamato-e painter Reizei Tamechika (1823-1864), painted a handscroll depicting relief efforts by the townspeople of Kyoto in the eight year of the Tenpō Era (1837). A handscroll by Reizei Tamechika depicts relief efforts by ChioninTemple in Kyoto.
Both paintings were produced more than a decade after the Tenpō Era famine at the close of the Edo Period, the Bakumatsu Era (1854-68). What does this suggest about the incentives for their creation and the nature of documentary painting in general? In order to answer these questions I will analyse the interplay of image and text in the paintings. I will also consider the cultural background of the Bakumatsu Era. This time of rapid change saw major natural disasters, such as the Great Ansei Edo Earthquake (1855). This may have prompted interest in preserving the memory of past disasters.
Session Four 4.00-5.30
Melanie Gibson –A symbolic khassakiya: representations of the palace guard in murals and stucco sculpture
From the Abbasid period onwards several accounts of court ceremonial describe the ruler surrounded by a royal bodyguard made up of Turkish slave soldiers (ghulam pl. ghilman). The accounts emphasize their special dress and armour: these were not ordinary soldiers appointed to throne room duty but a special retinue selected and trained to be on permanent assignment to the ruler. By the 11th century and possibly earlier, a tradition developed of displaying a second, inanimate guard along the walls of the throne room, rendered in paint and carved stone; by the Saljuq period these images of the palace guard were moulded in stucco and represented individual officers, recognizable by their specific attributes. It seems that in this period the institution of the khassakiya was formalised and demarcations of rank were indicated by a personal emblem. In this paper I will examine this tradition, focussing on the stucco sculptures and an associated group of ceramic figurines.
Anna McSweeney – Mudéjar Ceramics and the Tin Trade in Medieval Europe
The invention of tin glazing in the 9thcentury and the subsequent spread of the technique across the Islamic world was a key development in the history of ceramic decoration. Tin was the vital ingredient which made glazes opaque, allowing potters to cover earthenware clay with a white base onto which they could paint bright colours and bold motifs.
The technique reached its height in 14thcentury Paterna in eastern Spain, where mudéjar potters began to make tin glazed ceramics on an unprecedented scale. Unlike the luxury, one-off nature of tin glazed ceramics made in the Islamic world and in Al Andalus to date, these 14thcentury potters produced large quantities of roughly potted tableware, decorated with lively motifs in green and brown over a bright, white tin glaze.
Tin was not a commodity found locally to eastern Spain – it had to be imported. It was the exploitation of new sources of tin from southwest England, traded by merchants along the new trade routes from England to the Mediterranean, that allowed the potters in Paterna to develop their industries as commercial enterprises. The availability of a new, reliable and abundant source of tin played a vital role in the decorative style of Paterna ware and in the success of the industry. Documentary and archaeological sources demonstrate the importance of this trade in Cornish tin for the ceramics industry in the medieval Mediterranean.
Rosalind Wade-Haddon - The Enigmatic so-called Bojnurd Wares, or a Series of Grey Wares from the Mongol World
The inspiration for making a more detailed study of these so-called Bojnurd wares is Oliver Watson who is extremely sceptical about their authenticity. He styles them as “a new type of Sultanabad ware that came in quantities onto the market only in the 1970s.” (Ceramics from Islamic Lands2004, 386). This is largely true – they are decorated in slipped-relief which is usually applied to a composite fritted body, and undoubtedly not as accomplished as what were formerly termed Sultanabad wares, and now more commonly as ‘coloured ground wares’, and indeed there was seemingly an influx of them in the 1970s following an exhibition mounted in Austen, Texas, by Iranian dealer Mehdi Mahboubian in 1970. Like Sultanabad, Bojnurd is a relatively modern city, located in north-east Iran, very close to the Turkmenistan border. When you sift through the provenance attributions in museum catalogue entries, the Juvayn area is more commonly cited, and more specifically the site of Isfarayin. This paper will explore the origins and distribution of these wares and demonstrate the widespread use of this specific form of decoration.