World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies

Barcelona, July 19th - 24th 2010

· NOT_DEFINED institution: Ha'atelier Platform for Philosophy and Art

· NOT_DEFINED organizer: A.S. Bruckstein Çoruh

· NOT_DEFINED language: English

· NOT_DEFINED description: The TASWIR exhibition (Berlin 2009/2010) ‘Pictorial Mappings of Modernity and Islam’ developed an exhibition parcours of visual, literary, and acoustic materials presenting objects of classical Islamic art alongside with contemporary artists from East and West, including such different positions as William Forsythe, Rebecca Horn, Wolfgang Laib, Song Dong, or Walid Raad. Creating a closely interwoven poetic texture in-between East and West, Europe and Islam, classical and contemporary artefacts in this exhibition became subject to debate within its public reception, from Berlin to Teheran, Boston and Istanbul. The exhibition project TASWIR is ongoing and employs a curatorial critique of representation, working with classical literary sources (ibn Arabi, Maimonides) alongside modern and contemporary references (Roland Barthes, William Forsythe, Walid Raad). In a performative parcours of poetic, ‘free’ associations, it thereby subverts any imaginary collective projection of the ‘East’ still prominent in the Euro-centric perspectives of Western curators. The TASWIR project presently develops a digital atlas in which the various artistic materials of TASWIR exhibition(s) are ?deposited?, recorded, edited, enlarged upon, re-arranged, disrupted, and opened up for new interpretations. This digital atlas which is the subject of this contribution - is a digital palimpsest, an ephemeral and dynamic organisation of knowledge that overwrites its own history with continuously updated configurations. (www.taswir.org) The TASWIR project engages classical exhibits and topics from Islamic and Jewish traditions as constituents of a post-colonial cultural agenda. The project thereby relocates the axis of European Modernity which in the reception of Aby Warburg?s renowned Mnemosyne Atlas was generally (mis)taken as an exclusive extension of the European Renaissance and of classical antiquity. Presenter: Prof. A.S. Bruckstein ÇoruhPhilosopher and curator, initiator of the TASWIR-project. Founding Director of Ha’atelier Platform for Philosophy and Art. Initiator and Director of ''''Jewish and Islamic Hermeneutics as Cultural Critique” at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin together with Navid Kermani and Angelika Neuwirth. Various professorships in Europe, a.o. the Rudolf Arnheim Professorship at the Humboldt University in Berlin (2004) and the Martin-Buber Professorship at the Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt a. M. (until 2006); Exhibitions: TASWIR, “Pictorial Mappings of Modernity and Islam”, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 2009-2010; “Claudio Lange: Islam in Cathedrals. Images of the Anti-Christ in Romanesque Sculpture”, Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin, 2003-2004. Publications, a.o.: TASWIR, “Islamische Bildwelten und Moderne” (ed.), Berlin, 2009; “Vom Aufstand der Bilder. Materialien zu Rembrandt und Midrasch”, 2007; Claudio Lange. “Der nackte Feind. Anti-Islam in der romanischen Kunst” (ed.), 2004; “Hermann Cohen on Maimonides” Ethics, 2004.