ReSIA: The Concept of Mediation on the Timurid Qur’ans on Chinese Gold-Painted Coloured Paper
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
6:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS University of London
- Room
- R301 (SOAS Main Building, Third Floor)
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
This presentation will discuss the concept of mediation in Islamic art, which Oleg Grabar rendered popular with The Mediation of Ornament (1992).
This concept has notably been used to analyse the famous Timurid Qurans on Chinese gold-painted coloured paper in an essay from a recent collective volume (The Intermediary of Writing, 2022). The paper bears imageries drawing from a typical Chinese landscape iconography that strikingly remains visible and intersects with the Arabic text, raising the issue of this imagery’s aesthetic ontology and workings in the Quranic framework.
The essay talks about ‘an ambiguity between the gold images as a medium on which to write and an intermediary agent that conveys meaning’. But do the terms of ‘medium’ and ‘intermediary’ adequately describe the aesthetic processes at stake? If not, there must exist an alternative explanation for these processes, which this presentation will offer.
About the speaker
Dr Valérie Gonzalez specialises in Islamic art history and aesthetics. She holds a PhD in Islamic Studies and a Master of Fine Arts. Her research addresses critical questions such as art and religion, figurality, ornament and abstraction in Islamic visuality. Among her five authored books are: Aesthetic Hybridity in Mughal Painting, 1526-1658 (Ashgate 2015); Le piège de Salomon, La pensée de l'art dans le Coran (Albin Michel, 2002); and Beauty and Islam, Aesthetics of Islamic Art and Architecture (IBTauris, 2001). She is currently preparing The Metaphysics of Islamic Ornament, The Sacred and the Sensible in Islam (IBTauris, 2027).
Banner image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Ming Quran
