Център за академични изследвания най-сърдечно ви кани на предстоящата публична лекция на
проф. Чидем Кафесчиоглу, Босфорски университет/Boğaziçi Üniversitesi на тема:
”Place and Subjectivity in Pictorial Narratives of Late 16th-Century Istanbul”
Лекцията ще бъде на английски език и ще се проведе на 16 май (вторник) от 16:30ч. в конферентната зала на Центъра на адрес: ул. „Стефан Караджа”, №7, ет.2.
За повече подробности, моля вижте информацията по-долу.
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The paper engages with a familiar, if little noted aspect of Ottoman painting of the later sixteenth century: the sudden appearance of Istanbul’s public spaces and its denizens in the pages of courtly manuscripts. The illustrated Sūrnāme narrating and depicting the 1582 festival in Istanbul is one such book I will focus on, alongside a set of illustrated histories of the period. I suggest that these books incorporate what I would like to call ‘the view from the street’, a new way of representing city and urbanity, whose emergence is connected to shifting spatial practices and a shifting regime of visuality that reshaped the city centre of Istanbul at the turn of the seventeenth century. Within these years, new performative engagements on the part of urbanites and on the part of Ottoman elites informed the uses and the representations of public space at the city centre: at the main public square of Istanbul, the Atmeydanı, along the main processional artery, the Shahrah, or the Divanyolu, and at the boundary between court and city, the gate of the imperial palace. In texts and images, tropes of viewing and being viewed (captured in the words nazar, seyir, temaşa, involving groups and individuals in public spaces looking and being looked at, vistas and viewing points framing monuments, lands and seas,) intermingled with tropes of the spectacle and the spectacular. Aspects of Istanbulite urbanity and visuality, such themes were now framed in new modes of pictorial and textual representation. Within the same years, norms of courtly visuality predicated on the notion of an all-seeing, often invisible monarch were transformed, as a reciprocal engagement between ruler and ruled now located (also) in public spaces entered the representational world of Ottoman painters and authors.
This paper locates this novel set of topographic, narrative and textual imaginings of city and urbanity at a juncture of change, the profound transformation of Ottoman political and social order that began in the later decades of the 1500s, with immediate reverberations in the imperial capital. It explores the plural and dialogic aspects of these books produced at the court, now incorporating the perspectives of the street and the urbanite. It engages with three sets of questions in an attempt to understand the emerging view from the street: it seeks to understand practices and discourses of looking in connection to shifting spatial practices; it explores modes of urban subjectivity in relation to place and its representations; and finally, it seeks to understand the actual, imaginary, and performative makings of public space in an early modern context.
Çiğdem Kafescioğlu holds a M.A. degree in Art History, Department of History, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, 1988. She has defended a PhD thesis in Art History, Department of Fine Arts, Harvard University, 1996, with a dissertation on “The Ottoman Capital in the Making: The Reconstruction of Constantinople in the Fifteenth Century”. She served as a teaching fellow at Harvard University, Departments of Fine Arts, History, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1990-1997. An Associate Professor at Boğaziçi University, Department of History in 2008-2017, since 2017 she is Professor at the same university. Her research interests are in the fields of urban, architectural and visual culture of the Ottoman world, 1400-1700; spatiality and urban imagination; urban waterscapes; vernacular architecture and residential patterns; Mediterranean cartography.
Selected Books:
A Companion to Early Modern Istanbul, Shirine Hamadeh and Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, editors. Leiden: Brill, under contract, publication expected in 2018
Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.
Aptullah Kuran için Yazılar / Essays in Honour of Aptullah Kuran, Çiğdem Kafescioğlu and Lucienne Thys-Şenocak, editors. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999