Room 213 at MOA – Free — no registration required
This interdisciplinary seminar series on visual and material culture is for anyone with interest in this field across different departments at UBC and beyond. It is an informal forum to share research and exchange ideas, usually followed by conversations over a drink at Koerner’s Pub. Open to students, staff, faculty and community members in and around UBC.
Flow, Progression, Rest, Saygin Salgirli, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC
This talk is a conceptual exercise in two parts. It engages with three nouns (flow, progression, rest), and questions how they can be transformed into concepts for architectural and art historical analysis. Part one is based on my ongoing research, and it focuses on thirteenth and fourteenth-century architecture from Anatolia. Starting with the landscape and its territorial markings through Seljuk caravanserais (thirteenth century), it moves onto Bursa, the first Ottoman capital (fourteenth century), and questions whether a comparable patterning of movement through architecture could be observed in an urban context. Part two concerns my next research, and with a time leap and switch in medium, it deals with an eighteenth-century Ottoman manuscript, painted by the court artist Levni. It depicts the festivities organized to celebrate the circumcision of Sultan Ahmet III’s sons in 1720. The second part questions, on the one hand, how flow, progression, and rest can be used to analyze the manuscript, and on the other, how they can be utilized to relate the manuscript to the larger social context of late-sixteenth and early-eighteenth-century Istanbul.