In 2018 the international conference “History and Its Images”, organized by the Department of Art History of the European University at St. Petersburg, was dedicated to Francis Haskell’s seminal book of the same title, which greatly influenced the study of the visualization of the past. In 2020 we will host a second conference on the representation of the past in the arts and visual culture. Among the questions to be discussed are: how the visuals art and visual culture produce images of the past, how these images were perceived by the different communities and how they were transformed by the national context of their production.  

Current study of the visualization of history, the manufacturing of a collective past, rarely deals with the Islamic world, which, during over the last fifty years has been undergoing dramatic social change as new identities are constructed and the past reconsidered. We plan to have a special panel dealing with the issues of visual presentation of history in art in Islamic countries and with the role of art and architecture in this process.

The conference program will focus on the following interrelated panels:

— Visualizing history and ideology: 

• propaganda and representation of history; 
• the role of the visual arts in the invention of history; 
• visual art, history and the construction of national / identity. 

— Visualizing history in the context of the historical culture: 

• the function of historical knowledge in the artistic context; 
• the influence of historical studies on the production of works of art; 
• the role of works of art in the historical teaching; 
• images of the past and society’s conceptions of the past; 
• visualizing history and the question of evidence;
• visualizing history and the issue of historical memory. 

— Visualizing history in the art of Islamic countries

— Visualizing history and Orientalism

We are happy to consider proposals on other themes and subjects remain relevant to the main topic of the conference.