Sacrality and Surrogacy in the Devotional Arts of Islam
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08 Jan
10 Jan
2024
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Islamic Aesthetics
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Finbarr Barry Flood
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In the era of Artificial Intelligence, 3D printing, and Virtual Reality, questions about copies, replicas and surrogates are once again current. Yet, from the mimesis of sacred architecture to the copying of texts, through the embodied repetition of rituals, or the serial production of pilgrimage souvenirs, replication, reproduction and surrogacy have long been integral to many practices of devotion. Centuries before the modern era of technological reproduction, these made use of techniques of mass production such as engraving, molding and stamping. Despite being produced in multiples, many such devotional materials also had an intimate relationship to the human body. This series explores the resulting tensions between multiplicity and singularity, originality and surrogacy in the devotional arts of Islam.
In-person with live streaming on ZOOM
Duration -
January 8, 9, 10, 2024
Timing: Tea: 5:45 pm | Lecture: 6:15 - 8:45 pm IST
Fees
Rs. 3,000
Registrations Closed
Finbarr Barry Flood
Finbarr Barry Flood is director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories, and William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the Humanities at the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History, New York University. His work engages the potential of material culture to nuance histories of transcultural or transregional connectivity in ways that challenge their instrumentalization in essentialist politics of the present. Recent publications include Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton University Press, 2009), awarded the 2011 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, Technologies de dévotion dans les arts de l’Islam: pèlerins, reliques, copies (Musée du Louvre/Hazan, 2019) and Tales Things Tell – Material Histories of Early Globalisms, co-written with Beate Fricke, University of Bern (Princeton University Press, 2024).