“‘To be unable to dissimulate is to be unable to live’: The ‘Body Politic’ and Gender Trouble of a Swedish Queen”, by Professor Jonas Liliequist (CHE/Umeå University)

Date: Wednesday, 7 October, 2015
Time: 6.30pm
Venue: Arts Lecture Room 5 (G.61, Ground Floor, Arts Building), UWA.
RSVP: All Welcome! No need to RSVP – just come along.

‘In her day, Queen Christina (1626-89) was regarded as exceptional and scandalous by turns, from her unfeminine demeanor and libertine ideals to her refusal to marry, abdication of the throne and conversion to Catholicism in 1654. At the same time, Christina was also very much a child of her time. Starting with learned discussions and doctrines about female rulers, this presentation takes a closer look at Christina in the broader light of central themes in popular and scholarly culture, including crossdressing and role-playing, dissimulation and imposture, hermaphroditism and female masculinity.’

Professor Liliequist is an International Partner Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. His research focuses on love, sexuality, honour and shame in early modern Europe; and includes the dynamics of family emotions in 17th-18th century Sweden. For more info, see: http://www.umu.se/sok/english/staff-directory/?uid=joli0002&guise=anst2

“The Spice of Faith: Jesuits and the Arts and Emotions of ‘Accommodation'”, Professor Yasmin Haskell (Cassamarca Foundation Chair of Latin Humanism at The University of Western Australia; Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: 1100-1800)

Date: Thursday 12 November 2015
Time: 6:15pm – 7:15pm
Venue: Art Gallery of Western Australia Theatrette, Perth WA
Cost: Event is free but RSVP required

The Society of Jesus, a Catholic Reformation order founded in the 16th century by Ignatius of Loyola, earned a formidable and paradoxical reputation in the early modern period. The Pope’s ‘crack troops’ were deployed from Paris to Paraguay to Peking, converting souls, educating the élites of Catholic Europe and her overseas colonies, conducting diplomatic business and scientific research, producing music and drama, poems and pyrotechnics, art and architecture. Jesuits were active in mission fields through Asia, Africa and the Americas from the 16th -18th centuries and wrote extensively about their experiences. These were mined, in turn, by their brothers in Europe for poems, dramas, and other literature for education and edification. Jesuits were famous for their efforts to cross language barriers (writing dictionaries, translating, acting as diplomats and brokers) and for their chameleon-like ability to adapt to local circumstances. Some, like the Italian Matteo Ricci in China, seem to have enjoyed close friendships with new Christians from cultures radically different from their own.To what extent did early modern Jesuits evince what we might call ‘transcultural empathy’ for the non- European peoples they encountered in the overseas missions?

Was there anything in the Jesuits’ training and ‘way of proceeding’ that rendered them especially receptive to different cultures, or that encouraged them to see through others’ eyes? And what emotional work did ‘exotic’ arts, crafts, and other cultural products – some beautiful examples are on display in the ‘Treasure Ships’ exhibition – perform as tools for conversion and in fortifying Jesuits’ sense of their global, corporate identity?

Professor Yasmin Haskell, FAHA, is Cassamarca Foundation Chair of Latin Humanism at The University of Western Australia and a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: 1100-1800, where she leads team projects on ‘Jesuit Emotions’ and ‘Passions for Learning’. Her research interests span poetry and science, history of the Jesuits, and history of emotions and psychiatry.

Before coming to Perth, Yasmin was a research fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge (1995-2002). She has also been a visiting fellow at Christ Church and All Souls Colleges, Oxford, and a visiting fellow commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.

“Witches as ‘Others’: Mobilising Emotion in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Images”, Professor Charles Zika (University of Sydney)

Date: Thursday 15 October, 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: The University of Queensland Art Museum
Booking: Free but booking essential. RSVP by Friday 9 October. Email The University of Queensland Art Museum or call +61 7 3365 3046.

Refreshments will be served after the lecture.

Those accused of witchcraft during the European witch-hunt were generally understood to be extremely malicious and aggressive. As a moral and social threat, they had to be excluded from the benefits and protections of church and state, if not wholly exterminated. For this reason they were made to appear alien and other, and emotions were mobilised to make them such.

This lecture will explore some of the key emotional and visual strategies used by artists to identify witches as dangerous others. A predominant technique in the sixteenth century was to create discursive links to established motifs and visual codes that carried strong emotional attachments or resonances – the presence of devils or monsters; bodily attributes such as wild hair; objects such as body parts; or established motifs such as the riding of wild animals or signs of inversion. In the seventeenth century, however, viewers were often drawn into a complex emotional narrative that demonstrated the collective threat of witchcraft for Christian communities and moral order. Artists displayed this threat through the emotions encoded in the dances that witches performed during their Sabbath rituals, performances that began to feature in images of witchcraft for the first time.

Charles Zika is a Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at The University of Melbourne, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800). His interests lie in the intersection of religion, emotion, visual culture, and print in early modern Europe.

He is the author of The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Europe (Routledge, 2007), co-editor of a collection with Cathy Leahy and Jenny Spinks related to a 2012 exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, The Four Horsemen: Apocalypse, Death and Disaster (NGV, 2012), and co-author, with Margaret Manion, of Celebrating Word and Image 1250-1600 (Fremantle, 2013).

“The Wonders of Creation and the Singularities of Painting: An illustrated Arabic manuscript from the early 14th century,” Dr Stefano Carboni (Director, Art Gallery of Western Australia and Adjunct Professor of Islamic Art, The University of Western Australia)

Date: 5 October 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 1, University Club UWA (Parking: P3 off Hackett Entrance 1)
Cost: Free, but RSVP essential.

The subject of this lecture is the so-called London Qazvīnī, an early 14th-century illustrated Arabic copy of an encyclopaedia of natural history entitled (in translation) The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existing Things, which has an ambitious illustrative cycle and was likely created in Mosul in Northern Iraq. The author of the text, Zakariyā ibn Muḥammad ibn Maḥmūd al-Qazvīnī (1202-83), was a Persian of Arab origin from the city of Qazvin, who spent most of his life first in Mosul and then in Baghdad as a man of law and erudite scholar and held the position of professor in a prominent madrasa south of Baghdad. Acquired by the British Library in 1983 and unrecorded until then, the London Qazvīnī is an important document for the study of early illustrated Arabic copies of this text, representing the second earliest known surviving manuscript, as well as for the study of book illustration under the patronage of the Ilkhanids, or Mongols of Iran. In a single and unique manuscript are gathered earlier Mesopotamian painting traditions, Northern Iraqi and Southern Anatolian inspirations, the latest changes brought about after the advent of the Mongols, and a number of illustrations of extraordinary subjects which escape a proper classification. The manuscript is the subject of a book authored by Stefano Carboni and just released by Edinburgh University Press, which offers a presentation, stylistic analysis and discussion of its 368 miniature paintings that illustrate this codex, their scientific identification and a partial critical translation of the related Arabic text. The eclectic nature of the miniature paintings of the London manuscript adds important and unrecorded information to the study of early fourteenth-century Persian painting and this monographic work helps towards a better understanding of a still relatively obscure period in the history of Persian painting.

In October 2008, Stefano Carboni was appointed the 11th Director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. Since beginning his directorship, he has been instrumental in the implementation and delivery of several major projects including the successful completion of the $25m Tomorrowfund which is used for acquisitions of contemporary art, the reinstallation of the State Art Collection long-term displays, a very active program of acquisitions, the introduction of the Great Collections of the World Series of exhibitions including an Australian-exclusive three exhibition partnership with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Gallery façade recladding project, and a new vision document for the Gallery.

Prior to coming to Western Australia, Stefano was Curator and Administrator in the Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Visiting Professor at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. He joined the curatorial staff at the Metropolitan Museum in 1992 after completing graduate studies in Arabic and in Islamic Art at the University of Venice and his Ph.D. in Islamic Art at the University of London. At the Metropolitan Museum he was responsible for a large number of exhibitions, including the acclaimed Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797 (2006-2007).

His publications include authoring and editing several exhibition catalogues, among which are Glass of the Sultans (2001); the prestigious Barr Award winner The Legacy of Genghis Khan; Courtly Arts and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353 (2002); and Venice and the Islamic World. Another major publication is the catalogue of the Islamic glass collection in the National Museum of Kuwait (Glass from Islamic Lands. The Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait National Museum, 2001).

He is currently also Adjunct Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Western Australia and continues to lecture widely in Islamic art and curatorial studies.

The lecture will be followed by a celebration of the release of Dr Carboni’s new book: The Wonders of Creation and the Singularities of Painting. A Study of the Ilkhanid London Qazvīnī (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).