The Visual Past

with Ashley Dimmig

hosted by Abbey Stockstill and Musa Kazım Azimli

| The jewel-encrusted musket of Mahmud I is one of the most popular pieces at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. In this episode, curator Ashley Dimmig joins us to discuss her experience curating Islamic art and the manifold mysteries of the ornate 18th-century gun once owned by an Ottoman Sultan. These mysteries include practical questions about its design and the contents of its secret compartments as well as more conceptual puzzles about past provenance and effective presentation of Ottoman artifacts to international audience in an American city. In addition to discussing the fascinating history of the gun, Dr. Dimmig reflects on the exciting challenge of curating connections that allow every museum visitor to find an entry point into an exhibit.   

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with Wendy M. K. Shaw

hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan

| What is an image in Islam? Is its permissibility the main preoccupation of Islamic discourses? In this episode, Wendy M.K. Shaw revisits the foundations of art history and considers their colonial and Eurocentric roots. She discusses the stories of art and artists that circulated in the Islamic world, not all of which were accompanied with images, in order to understand what the role of art and the artist were conceived of the pre-modern Islamic world. Redefining concepts such as the image, perspective, art, and history, she sketches the alternative Islamic perceptual culture in which seeing with the ear and seeing with the heart are central to understanding this world as the manifestation of the divine.

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with Özge Calafato

hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan

| What can family and individual studio photographs tell us about social life in the early Republic of Turkey? In this episode, Özge Calafato highlights the negotiations between the Kemalist state, the photographers, and the people being photographed that led to classed and gendered representation of modern Turkish citizens in vernacular photography. Calafato analyzes not only the image, but also the context of production and the inscriptions written behind photographs. Looking at photos of subjects as ranging from beauty queens and feminist activists to bank employees and soldiers, she considers the production and circulation of photos not only in urban studios and within families but also in rural areas and within friendship groups.

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Episode 473

with Elisabeth Fraser

hosted by Emily Neumeier

For centuries, people have been documenting their travels with images, which purportedly function as visual evidence for someone’s experience far from home. This was no less the case for Europeans touring through Ottoman lands, who created a whole industry selling pictures from their time abroad. In this episode, Elisabeth Fraser explains how Western European artists at the turn of the eighteenth century began to create a new type of popular media, the illustrated travel volume. But these were not small guide books to tuck away in your pocket, they were large-scale luxury publications for the discerning armchair traveler. The enormous size and high production quality of these books and the accompanying images means that they were not the work of a single person but rather a large team of artists. Reflecting on these questions of authenticity, Dr. Fraser discusses how her research aims to take up a more nuanced view of the complexities of cross-cultural encounter.

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Episode 471

with Sato Moughalian

hosted by Sam Dolbee

David Ohannessian is one of the foremost pioneers of the ceramic styles associated today with the city of Jerusalem, but the remarkable story of how he ended up there has never been properly told. Born in 1884 outside of Eskişehir (modern-day Turkey), David Ohannessian became a master in the iconic Kütahya style of Ottoman ceramics. He worked on important architectural projects of the Ottoman government, only to be deported during the Armenian Genocide. He managed to survive, however, and continued his craft afterward in Jerusalem, where he became involved with restoration of the Dome of the Rock and opened his own ceramics studio in the Old City. Yet the past stayed with him, especially the weight of his experience during the genocide. In this episode, Sato Moughalian discusses Feast of Ashes, her recent biography of Ohannessian. She also talks about his story's personal resonance for her as Ohannessian's granddaughter. His artistic persistence provided a model of resilience to emulate in her own art, but the violence and displacement experienced by Ohannessian and his family also left a legacy of secrets and complicated grief in Moughalian's life that was long felt but seldom addressed. 

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Episode 465

with Robyn Dora Radway

hosted by Emily Neumeier

What was it like to be a foreigner living in Ottoman Istanbul? In this episode, our guest Robyn Dora Radway answers this question by providing an in-depth look at an unusual type of document: alba amicorum, or friendship albums, which were essentially the social media of the sixteenth century. Produced in the Habsburg embassy (aka the “German House"), these albums functioned like yearbooks in that the owners residing in the embassy would strive to collect all manner of mementos from their time abroad, including signatures, poems, short anecdotes, and even drawings and paintings. At the German House, men from all walks of life would end up assembling their own album amicorum, from the Habsburg ambassador to the cook (who was quite popular and had the largest album by far). We discuss how these albums can thus serve as a valuable resource for historians, as they offer a full picture of the social makeup of these kinds of diplomatic spaces—information that does not often turn up in more traditional archives.

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Bölüm 460

Fatih Parlak

Sunucu: Can Gümüş

Erken modern dönemde Avrupa’nın oyun dünyası nasıldı? Avrupa’nın çeşitli ülkelerinde üretilen bu oyunlarda Türkler nasıl temsil ediliyordu? Bu bölümde, Dr. Fatih Parlak ile bu sorular etrafında sohbet ediyoruz. Parlak’ın doktora tezi batılı kaynaklarda yer alan Türk imgesini durağan kabul eden ana akım yaklaşımları yeniden değerlendiriyor ve bu imgenin çok katmanlı ve çok yönlü olarak değerlendirilmesi gerektiğine vurgu yapıyor. Aynı zamanda, oyunları incelemenin açtığı yeni araştırma imkânlarını da tartışıyor.

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Episode 445

with Mary Roberts

hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan

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The line between Orientalist and Ottoman painting might at first seem clear. But in this episode, historian Mary Roberts argues that such distinctions are in fact complicated, drawing on her recent book Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture. She explains how Istanbul became a global center of production, circulation, and exhibition of visual culture in the nineteenth century. Ottomans and Orientalists both contended and connected with each other--whether in Pera or in the palace--and Roberts discusses how these networks of patronage and apprenticeship eventually led to works that were produced in Istanbul ending up all around the world. There they became defined as Orientalist, but Roberts unearths the more tangled genealogy of their production, as well as the relevance of audience in these characterizations. 

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Episode 407

with Heghnar Watenpaugh

hosted by Emily Neumeier

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The genre of biography usually applies to people, but could a similar approach be applied to an object? Can a thing have a life of its own? In this episode, Heghnar Watenpaugh explores this question by tracing the long journey of the Zeytun Gospels, a famous illuminated manuscript considered to be a masterpiece of medieval Armenian art. Protected for centuries in a remote church in eastern Anatolia, the sacred book traveled with the waves of people displaced by the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the chaos of the First World War, it was divided in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty Museum in LA. In this interview, we discuss how the Zeytun Gospels could be understood as a "survivor object," contributing to current discussions about the destruction of cultural heritage. We also talk about the challenges of writing history for a broader reading public.

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Episode 400

with Nir Shafir

hosted by Suzie Ferguson

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In this episode, Nir Shafir talks about the problem of "fake minatures" of Islamic science: small paintings that look old, but are actually contemporary productions. As these images circulate in museums, on book covers, and on the internet, they tell us more about what we want "Islamic science" to be than what it actually was. That, Nir tells us, is a lost opportunity.

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