Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Middle Eastern

This impressive work of scholarship brings together anthropology, religion, popular culture, and history in its focus on Bakhtiari lion tombstones that have remained largely unknown and hence little studied. Although lions have long figured in Iranian history, art and myth as symbols of rulership, power, religious leadership or as steadfast guardians, art historians have tended to concentrate their attentions on court traditions and the role of lions in popular culture, especially in religion, has remained little considered until this book. Funerary stone lions are to be found throughout...

Islamic Art and the Museum provides a historical and conceptual analysis of Islamic art and documents the successes and failings of its presentation in museums worldwide. The contributors challenge existing notions on the research, methodology, and analysis of Islamic art and investigate the extent to which socio-historical and anthropological approaches result in new analytical perspectives. They also examine the difficulties that need to be overcome when presenting Islamic art to avoid reducing the objects merely to the visual and aesthetic.

Museums covered in detail include...

Chaouki Chamoun is one of the Middle East's most renowned artists. With 319 color plates to illustrate his story, Chamoun leads us through his own artistic journey, showing how the schools of the modern era have informed his technique and imagery, and how he has been motivated and inspired as much by the tiniest details of a pebble as by the political turmoil visited on his homeland.

Born in Lebanon in 1942, Chaouki Chamoun has participated in over fifty group art shows and biennales since 1969. He is the president of the Lebanese Artists Association and has studied at both...

Light and Shadows highlights the 2,700-year history of Jews in Iran. It reveals centuries of oppression, fascinating cultural borrowings, and great artistic achievements. The story is told through rare archaeological artifacts, illuminated manuscripts, beautiful ritual objects and amulets, ceremonial garments, musical instruments, photographs, and more.

It examines as well the large-scale exodus of the Jewish community following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Today, at least 25,000 practicing Jews remain in Iran, unwilling to give up their ancestral home and the distinctive...

Byzantine 'iconoclasm' is famous and has influenced iconoclast movements from the English Reformation and French Revolution to Taliban, but it has also been woefully misunderstood: this book shows how and why the debate about images was more complicated, and more interesting, than it has been presented in the past. It explores how icons came to be so important, who opposed them, and how the debate about images played itself out over the years between c. 680 and 850. Many widely accepted assumptions about 'iconoclasm' - that it was an imperial initiative that resulted in widespread...

Pars Pro Toto III is the result of a close dialog between Egyptian-German artist Susan Hefuna and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. The focus in this book is on Hefuna's complex work groups on site-specific and architectural installations, video works and choreographies. Hefuna uses urban spaces and cities like Cairo, London, Istanbul, Sharjah, Sydney, New York, and Vienna as her laboratory. The artist interacts with dancers, communities, urban and human structures in both personal and political ways. Pars Pro Toto III also features a foreword by Hans Ulrich Obrist, an interview with the...

"Examines a crucial period in Arabic literature which has received insufficient attention previously--the pre-modern writers of the 19th century . . . whose journalism and fiction not only shaped contemporary opinion but also subtly molded the contours and boundaries of discourse for the generations that followed."--Michael Beard, University of North Dakota

Dynamic and original, this study of the formation of modern Arab identity discusses the work of "pioneers of the Arab Renaissance," both renowned and forgotten--a pantheon of intellectuals, reformers, and journalists whose writing...