The Ottoman Cosmopolitanism Network in conjunction with the IGRS (Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies) present an afternoon of dialogue.
Saturday 22 June, 2013; 10.30am – 13.00; Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies; Room 246 Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU
Event organiser and chair: Dr Colette Wilson, Lecturer in French, University of Westminster, Fellow, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies. Discussant: Dr Jay Prosser, Reader in Humanities, University of Leeds
Professor Sahar Hamouda, English and Comparative Literature, University of Alexandria, Egypt, Director of the Alexandria Center for Hellenistic Studies, and Deputy Director of the Alexandria and Mediterranean Research Center at the Biblioteca Alexandrina, will present a paper entitled: “Memory and Space: Oral Narrative of a pre-1948 Jerusalemite Family.” Sahar Hamouda’s paper is based on her family memoir, Once Upon a Time in Jerusalem, which is based on her life in Jerusalem before the Nakba/foundation of Israel.
Dr Gabriel Koureas, Department of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck College, University of London, will present a paper entitled: “Curating Ottoman Memories: Klitsa Antoniou’s The Persistence of the Image and Parallelotopias.” Gabriel Koureas’s paper presents and discusses two exhibitions of the work of Cypriot artist Klitsa Antoniou, which he curated in Salonika, Greece, between 2011 and 2013. The installation The persistence of the Image shown in Nicosia in June 2011 at the Artos Foundation and at the Salonika Biennale (September to December 2011) was the result of a collaboration between Klitsa Antoniou and eighty-five artists, architects, designers, sociologists, art historians and art students who live in Cyprus and who were asked to work on a photograph of Hala Sultan Tekke in Larnaca, Cyprus. The tekke is considered to be the third most important religious Islamic site in the world and evidence exists as to the site’s syncretic appeal throughout the Ottoman period in the history of Cyprus. However, Greek Orthodox sources try to downplay or refute this very important function of the site. The second installation, Parallelotopias, exhibited at the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece in Salonika (November 2012 – January 2013), takes as its starting point Orhan Pamuk’s book Istanbul, Memories of a City, in order to reveal the mechanisms and dynamics of memory, documentation and narration of individual and collective history.
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