Landscapes of the Long 18th Century: Mediating Places, Powers and Pasts in South Asia and Beyond

This workshop seeks to explore how painters, poets, historians and intellectuals have imagined landscapes and urbanisms in and of early modern South Asia, particularly over the course of the long eighteenth century. The mediation of memory and place in pictorial and literary practices in this time period was shaped by aesthetic, and philosophical ideas and an epistemic situation that had deeper genealogies in the subcontinent and the broader Asian and Islamic world. Nonetheless, images, moods and ideologies encapsulated in British landscape painting and colonial photography have constructed the dominant lens that has shaped historical inquiries into spatial imaginings in the South Asian context. The focus on the long eighteenth century enables us to establish conversations between the intersections, connections and comparisons that emerged in visual practices commissioned by diverse patrons from regional kings, Mughal emperors, trans-regional merchants, and British officers.

Participants

  • Lamia Balafrej (Arthistories Fellow 2016-17/ Wellesly College)
  • Tim Barringer (Yale University)
  • Chanchal Dadlani (Wake Forest University)
  • Raffael Gadebusch (Museum for Asian Art, Berlin, SMB)
  • Lihong Liu (Rochester University)
  • Monica Juneja (Universität Heidelberg) 
  • Venugopal Maddipati (Arthistories Fellow 2016-17/ Ambedkar University Delhi), Francesca Orsini (School of Oriental and African Studies, London)
  • Sunil Sharma (Boston University)
  • Yuthika Sharma (Edinburgh College of Art) 
  • Nobuko Toyosawa (Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences) 
  • Ning Yao (CAHIM Fellow 2016-17)

PROGRAM

June 21

  • Forum Transregional Studies | Wallotstraße 14, 14193 Berlin

18.00 Evening Lecture

Tim Barringer (Yale University): The Panorama as Global Landscape

June 22

  • Forum Transregionale Studien | Wallotstraße 14, 14193 Berlin

10:00 Welcome and Introduction :Hannah Baader and Dipti Khera

Chair: Lamia Balafrej (ArtHistories Fellow 2016-17/Wellesly College)

10.30 Sunil Sharma (Boston University): The Pastoral Landscape in Early Modern Persian Poetry and Painting

11:20 Chanchal Dadlani (Wake Forest University): History Without Words: Mughal Architecture in the 'Amal-i Salih.

12.40 Hannah Baader (Forum Transregional Studies/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut) : Seascape and Landscape, Florence 1604

Chair: Monica Juneja (Universität Heidelberg)

14.30 Yuthika Sharma (Edinburgh College of Art): Picturing Place: Topography as Mughal Identity in Late 18th Century Delhi

15.20 Dipti Khera (NYU, Arthistories Fellow 2015-16): The Art of Feeling Place: Udaipur's Affective Assertions

Chair: Ning Yao (CAHIM Fellow 2016-17)

16.40 Nobuko Toyosawa (Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences): Mediating the sense of place from Tokugawa to Meiji Japan

17: 30 Lihong Liu (Rochester University): Long Day and Sleepless Night: Temporal Sensitivity in Chinese Landscape Painting 

June 23

  • Museum for Asian Art | Lansstraße 8, 14195 Berlin

9: 45 – 12:30 Study Session in the Museum for Asian Art 

With Raffael Gadebusch; New "Perspectives" – Landscape and Architecture as Subject Matter in Late 18th Century Indo-Islamic Painting(speakers and invited guests only) 

June 23

  • Forum Transregionale Studien | Wallotstraße 14, 14193 Berlin

Chair: Venugopal Madipatti (Art Histories Fellow 2016-17/Ambedkar University Delhi)

14:00 Francesca Orsini (SOAS University of London): The work of description: Shifting modes of poetic description of places in 19th-century Urdu narratives

14:50 Tim Barringer (Yale University): The Proleptic Picturesque of Joseph Bartholomew Kidd 

16. 00 Final Discussion