Every student of Arabic and Islamic culture, art, philosophy… that has spent at least one month studying or doing research in Venice has read the wonderful graphic novel by Hugo Pratt Favola di Venezia – Sirat al-Bunduqiyya. And of course I did when I was studying there. On Dec, 4th (2014) a video-game based on the novel…
Tag: Islamic art
Social Media & Islamic Art: a survey
After few months spent dealing with Islamic art in social media, we are more and more interested in understanding what people like about Islamic art and how people use social platforms to get information about it. We thus launched a survey.
Islamic Art Auctions, Fall 2014 – Some notes
Sometimes researchers tend to close themselves in an ivory tower made of books, articles, journals and objects of art (in my case inscriptions), without considering how the world outside actually relies on money. Also art and art history in some sense. A couple of weeks ago, at Bonhams, the last auction of Islamic Art of…
Redating and relocalising a tombstone from Wikipedia
Update to this post: Jamila’s gravestone: update On WikiCommons there is the picture of a gravestone. It is written in a beautifully decorated kufic script. It is not that Fatimid type of kufic where the foliation/floriation is so overwhelming that you can barely read what’s written, and it is not that early kufic that has…
When the Islamic collection is travelling…a chance to re-think historical and contemporary Islamic art
Few days ago LACMA closed its beautiful gallery displaying Islamic art. In an article, the curator of the museum Linda Komaroff has explained what’s going to happen next.
When Islamic art is everywhere and context is nowhere
There is a great misinformation and decontextualisation relating Islamic art. The first problem being what Islamic art is. Quite a tricky problem. But now I don’t want to concentrate on this particular issue: in this post when I talk about Islamic art I mean the art developed in an Islamic context…ok…it is even trickier. Let’s say that…
“The Representation of Islam in British Museums”, by I. Heath
I. Heath, The Representation of Islam in British Museums, Archaeopress, Oxford 2007. The book can be purchased on Archaeopress website. According to the Collins English Dictionary Online, a museum is “a place or building where objects of historical, artistic, or scientific interest are exhibited, preserved, or studied”. This definition is pretty neutral, not considering how a…
A free encyclopaedia of Islam (and Islamic art)
Few days ago, maybe one week, I started wondering: is there an open-source and serious encyclopaedia on Islamic history and Islamic art? Apart from partial and biased interpretation on the history of Arab-Islamic countries, and not 100% reliable sources (wikis), the only way to get free good information on Islamic history is hoping that your…
SquareKufic 