Challenging Convention
Young Finnish with Muslim Background Negotiating Their Belonging through Art
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maritta Oikarinen-Jabai
In the project there are five male and five female co-researchers. I have been mainly working with female participants (age 21-35). They have multiple backgrounds and their relationship to religion differs. Generally, their various subject positions intersect (or even conflict) with each other. Anyway, their common experience is that they are subjected to certain expectations and images, both from the side of the majority population and their own ethnic and religious communities. In their artworks they deal for example with the questions concerning gender and space, islamophobia, Islamic feminist and queer views and more generally topics such as living in-between cultures, multilingualism, spirituality and transnational identities. In my paper I will discuss deeper the background of the project, present the art works done by the participants and the ideas the research process has awaken.
Mirrored Realities: Reflections in the Art of Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, and Walter Sickert
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Melanie Enderle
The inclusion of decorative mirrors can enrich a painting’s structure and meaning by reflecting what otherwise would not be seen. Mirrored images enhance spatial complexity, magnify light, and conflate allusions with illusions. In Renaissance and Baroque paintings, mirrors variously symbolized vanity, wealth, purity, and intellectual contemplation. More recently, artists have emphasized mirrors’ ability to startle, surprise, inform, and even confuse the viewer. This paper explores individual paintings by artists of the late-19th and early-20th centuries working in France and England who were influenced by their predecessors and continued their interest in the optical qualities of the looking glass, but these early-modern painters expanded the possibilities of the mirrored image by exaggerating alternate, sometimes illogical views and enhancing the introspective, psychological acuity of figures caught in reflection. Édouard Manet, Mary Cassatt, and Walter Sickert each painted common scenes of leisure life in music halls, theaters, and domestic interiors, enhanced by ornate gilt-framed mirrors that added complexity to these otherwise mundane spaces. For these artists, the illusionary quality of mirrors and their reflections became devices to deepen meaning and heighten the conflict between reality and artifice, between outward appearance and inner emotion, and to give insight into modernity, societal traditions, and psychological states of people captured in the mirrored reflections.
Socio-historical Approach to Shahnama’s Illustrations: Cases of Baysunghuri and Davari’s Manuscripts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Fatemeh Mahvan, Mohammad Jafar Yahaghi
Adopting a socio-historical approach, the illustrated Shahnama (Iranian National epic) manuscripts can unravel the life situations of their addressees during the times. Although Shahnama is a book which has been well embraced by painters, the type of illustrations has been exposed to variations concerning socio-historical conditions. With that in mind, we try to answer the following questions: What are the impacts of addresses on Shahnama `s illustrations? And is it possible to guess at the addresses by scrutinizing the paintings? In this study by selecting two copies of the Iranian National epic, Baysunghuri (Timurid: 15th century) and Davari, (Qajarid: 19th century), we attempt to answer the above-mentioned questions. To this end, we examine the themes and pictorial elements of these manuscripts in light of the relationship between the paintings and the addressees (in some cases patronage) of Shahnama. The results of this research reveal that the type of addressee (being royal or non-royal) plays a significant role in choosing the themes and the image’s elements.
Fractured Gazes: Intertextual Forms of the Black Female Subject in Opera Performance
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carla Chambers
Considering contemporary discourse around equity and inclusive representation in the Fine and Performing Arts, this paper is a comparative study on intertextual representations of the black female subject in 18th and 19th-century visual art and their narrative, musical, and visual manifestations in the 19th-century opera, Aida by Giuseppe Verdi. Using art, music, and cultural criticism within an intersectional framework of feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory this thesis examines the ways in which the subjectivity of the black female is suppressed in Western visual culture and visually in operatic narratives. I suggest that the symbolic power of the Fine Arts and operatic spaces work together by ascribing a visual aesthetic derived from colonialist assemblages of the black female to the body. As this aesthetic reifies in operatic spaces, this discussion also considers the intersectional positionalities of the black woman as artist, viewer, and catalyst for emancipatory artistic practice that subverts the effects of traumatic artistic methodologies. Thus, I propose that the embodied performance of black women disrupts hegemonic spaces, troubles colonialist ways of seeing, and offers possibilities for the stage to be a site of resistance to racial hegemony in the Fine and Performing Arts.
