Thursday 12 June 2008, 18.30–21.00
Friday 13 June 2008, 10.00–18.00

What is the current debate on Edward Said's radical book Orientalism? Is his argument too binary between East and West? What is the relevance of the Middle Eastern art market? And how did people of the Middle East view it?  This major syposium opens up a whole field of study relevant to anyone interested in interconnections between art, politics, and representation from the nineteenth century to today. Join distinguished speakers Zynep Celik, John MacKenzie, Ziauddin Sardar, Mary Roberts and Bashir Makhoul for this day-long debate.

Programme

9.30 - 10.00 Registration, Clore Foyer

10.00 Welcome: Paul Goodwin (Cross Cultural Curator, Tate Britain)

Session 1: Orientalism and Art Histories

Chair: Christine Riding (Curator, 18th and 19th Century British Art, Tate Britain)

Panel 1

10.10 - 10.30 Professor Mary Roberts (John Schaeffer Associate Professor of British Art, University of Sydney)

At the Margins of British Orientalism

10.30 - 10.50 Professor Zeynep Çelik (Professor of Architecture, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)

The Lure of Orientalism: View from the East

10.50 - 11.00 Audience Q&A

11.00 - 11.20 Morning tea break

Panel 2

11.20 - 11.40 Dr Nicholas Tromans (Senior Lecturer in Art History, Kingston University)

Orientalism and the Place of the Visual

11.40 - 12.00 Professor John MacKenzie (Professor Emeritus in Imperial History, Lancaster University)

The Modern and the Anti-Modern: The Lessons from the Orient

12.00 - 12.10 Audience Q&A

12.10 - 12.40 Panel session: Professor Mary Roberts, Professor Zeynep Çelik, Dr Nicholas Tromans, Professor John Mackenzie

12.40 - 14.00 Lunch (not included)

Session 2: Orientalism and the Politics of Representation

Chair: Raficq Abdulla (Visiting Fellow, Faculty of Business and Law, Kingston University)

Panel 3

14.10 - 14.30 Dr Charles Small (Director of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, Yale University, USA)

From the Gaze of the Colonial and Post-Colonial: Judeo-phobia, Empire, Islamism

14.30 - 14.50 Dr Kamran Rastegar (Lecturer in Arabic and Persian Literatures, University of Edinburgh)

Curating Diaspora Artists of Muslim-majority Societies in the Metropole: A Third Space, or Neo-Orientalism?

14.50 - 15.00 Audience Q&A

Panel 4

15.00 - 15.20 Professor Ziauddin Sardar (Columnist and author, Visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies, City University, London)

Orientalism: Then and Now

15.20 - 15.40 Professor Bashir Makhoul (Head of School, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton)

Occupation of an Equal Space

15.40 - 15.50 Audience Q&A

15.50 - 16.20 Panel session: Dr Charles Small, Dr Kamran Rastegar, Professor Ziauddin Sardar, Professor Bashir Makhoul

16.20 - 16.40 Afternoon tea break

16.40 - 17.30 Final Plenary and Audience Q&A

18.00 Symposium closes

Participants

Raficq Abdulla has been a legal adviser to various corporate organisations and institutions over several years. He is now a Visiting Fellow of the Faculty of Business and Law at Kingston University. He is also a writer, public speaker, and broadcaster. He is a trustee of the Poetry Society, Planet Poetry and of English PEN. In 1999, Raficq was awarded an MBE for his interfaith work between Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

Prof. Zeynep Çelik is Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her publications include The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, 1986; California, 1993), Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth Century World’s Fairs (California, 1992), Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (California, 1997), Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (California, 1993—coeditor), and the forthcoming Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830-1914 (Washington, 2008) and Walls of Algiers: Narratives of the City through Text and Image (Getty Publications and Washington, 2009 -coeditor). She served as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2000-2003). Professor Çelik is currently working on two exhibitions related to her forthcoming books (to be held in the Galleries of the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul and at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles respectively) and conducting new research on the historiography of archaeology in the late Ottoman Empire.

Prof Emeritus John MacKenzie is the author of Propaganda and Empire (1984), The Empire of Nature (1988), Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (1995), and The Scots in South Africa (2007). His edited works include two exhibition catalogues: David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa (National Portrait Gallery, 1997) and The Victorian Vision (V&A 2001), as well as Peoples, Nations and Cultures (2005). His latest book, Museums and Empire will be published in 2009. Now retired, he is emeritus professor at Lancaster, holds honorary professorships of Aberdeen, St. Andrews and Edinburgh Universities, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Prof. Bashir Makhoul (Fine Art/Southampton University) is an artist and educator born (1963) in Galilee, Israel. He has been based in the United Kingdom for the past eighteen years. During this time he has produced a body of work, based on repeated motifs which can be characterised by their power of aesthetic seduction. Once drawn into the work, however, viewers find themselves engaged with something far more complicated than a beautiful pattern. Economics, nationalism, war and torture are frequently woven into the layers of Makhoul’s work and often the more explicit the material, the more seductive the surface. Makhoul completed his PhD in 1995 at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has exhibited his work widely in Britain and internationally, including the Hayward Gallery London, Tate Liverpool, Harris Museum Preston, Arnolfini Gallery Bristol, Ikon Gallery Birmingham, The Liverpool Biennial, The Herzilya Museum Israel, Jordan National Museum, NCA Gallery Lahore Pakistan, The Florence Biennial, Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin, UTS Gallery Sydney Australia, Elga Wimmer Gallery New York, Changshu Art Museum, Suzhou Art Museum, Shenzhen Art Museum China and many others. He has received several prestigious awards from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Sheffield Hallam University, North West Arts Board amongst others. He is the co-author of/contributor to several books/publications including Identity Theft, published by Chicago and Liverpool press; he is the author of Return, published by deebipublishing; Ibrahim Noubani, Outside the Camp, published by The Israeli Museum Tel Aviv; and Return in conflict published by Issueart New York. He was the Head of Department of Art and Design and the Director of the Research Institute of Media Art and Design at the University of Bedfordshire (previously Luton). He was also the founding Head of School of Media Art and Design at the same University. He is currently the head of one of the UK’s leading art schools, Winchester School of Art of the University of Southampton.

Dr Kamran Rastegar (Literature/Edinburgh) is Lecturer in Arabic and Persian Literatures at the University of Edinburgh, where he teaches comparative cultural and literary histories of the modern Middle East. He researches on topics relating to contemporary literary and visual cultures of Iran and the Arab world. His recent publications include: “Trauma and Maturation in Women’s War Narratives: The Eye of the Mirror and Cracking India,” in The Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies. A book study, Literary Modernity Between Europe and the Middle East has been published Routledge (2007), and his translation of Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Missing Soluch was published by Melville House Press (2007). He is presently the supervisor of a British Academy-sponsored research network on the theme “Memory, Trauma and Identity in Literary and Visual Cultures of the Middle East”.

Christine Riding (Tate Britain) has been the Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Art at Tate Britain since June 1999. Previously she was a consultant curator at the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) and she has held curatorial positions at the Wallace Collection and the Museum of London. She has lectured and published widely on art and design of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including co-editing The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture (Merrell Publishers, 2000), and author of John Everett Millais (Tate Publishing, 2006) and co-author of Hogarth (Tate Publishing, 2006). She is currently deputy editor of Art History (Journal of the Association of Art Historians). At Tate Britain, she has co-curated the William Blake exhibition (Tate Britain, 2000 and The Metropolitan Museum, New York, 2001), Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French Romantics, 1820- 1840 (Tate Britain, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Metropolitan Museum, 2003), A Picture of Britain (Tate Britain, 2005) and William Hogarth (Musee du Louvre, Tate Britain and La Caxia Forum, 2006-7). She is the Tate curator and project leader of The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting (Yale Center for British Art, Tate Britain, Pera Museum, Istanbul and Sharjah Art Museum, UAE, 2008-9).

Prof. Mary Roberts (Art History/Sydney University) is the John Schaeffer Associate Professor of British Art at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Intimate Outsiders. The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Duke, 2007) and has co-edited three books: Edges of Empire. Orientalism and Visual Culture (Blackwells, 2005), Orientalism’s Interlocutors. Painting, Architecture, Photography (Duke, 2002) and Refracting Vision. Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried (Power, 2000). She has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Yale Center for British Art, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, The Australian Academy of the Humanities and The Australian Research Council. She has been awarded a Getty Scholar Grant at the Getty Research Institute in 2008-9 for her current project on the Artistic Exchanges between Ottoman and Orientalist artists in nineteenth-century Istanbul.

Prof. Ziauddin Sardar writer, broadcaster and cultural critic, is Visiting Professor in the School of Arts, the City University. Considered a pioneering writer on Islam and contemporary cultural issues, he is listed on Prospect Magazine’s ‘Britain’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals’ and has been described as ‘Britain’s own Muslim polymath’. He is the author of over 40 books, including his classic studies, Postmodernism and the Other (1998), Orientalism (1999) and the international bestseller Why Do People Hate America? (2002). A collection of his writings is available as Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: A Ziauddin Sardar Reader (2003) and How Do You Know?: Reading Ziauddin Sardar on Islam, Science and Cultural Relations (2006).  His intellectual autobiography, Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim and his most recent film for the BBC, ‘Battle for Islam’, have received wide acclaim. He is the editor of Futures, the monthly journal of policy, planning and futures studies, and a columnist on the New Statesman. He is widely known for his radio and television appearances. Balti Britain: A Journey Through British Asian Experience will be published by Granta in September.

Dr Charles Asher Small is Director of the Yale University Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA), the first research institute of its kind in North America.  He lectures on the Ethics, Politics and Economics (EPE) Program at Yale University in the Political Science Department. Charles received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, McGill University, Montreal; a M.Sc. in Urban Development Planning in Economics, Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London; and a Doctorate of Philosophy (D.Phil), St. Antony's College, Oxford University. Charles Small completed post-doctorate research at the Groupe de recherche ethnicité et société, Université de Montréal. He taught in departments of sociology and geography at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Tel Aviv University, and the Institute of Urban Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He was also an Associate Professor and the Director of Urban Studies at SCSU, Connecticut. He worked as a consultant and policy advisor in North America, Europe, Southern Africa and the Middle East; and has lectured internationally. Charles specialises in social and cultural theory, globalization and national identity, socio-cultural policy and the study of racisms - including Antisemitism. 

Dr Nicholas Tromans is Senior Lecturer at Kingston University, London. He is the curator of The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, and author of David Wilkie: The People’s Painter (Edinburgh 2007).

Tate Britain  Auditorium
£35 (£25 concessions), booking required
Private view and drinks reception on Thursday 12 June. Please use the Manton Entrance on Atterbury St.

    

This event is related to the The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting exhibition