Date:
Location:
The Tunisia Office of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University
in collaboration with the Centre des Etudes Maghrébines à Tunis (CEMAT)
are pleased to invite you to:
ICONOGRAPHY OF A LEADER: PAST AND PRESENT PORTRAYAL OF HABIB BOURGUIBA
A panel discussion with:
William Granara, Research Professor of Arabic, Harvard University
Jessica Gerschultz, Associate Professor, Department of African and African-American Studies, University of Kansas
Iheb Guermazi, Architect and Urban Historian, Ph.D. in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art, Massachusetts Institute for Technology
Beya Othmani, Curator, researcher, Andrew W. Mellon Art History Fellow at CEMAT.
About the discussion:
This panel explores the iconography of Habib Bourguiba, first President of the Tunisian Republic (r. 1957-87) and the various creative manipulations of his image during, before, and after three decades of his rule. Presentations will review the production and dissemination of the imagery of Tunisia’s Zaʿīm [leader] in state-contexts, official portraits, statues, coins, in political propaganda imagery, via mainstream photography and video journalism. The panel will also interrogate official and popular representations of Bourguiba’s figure in critical, satirical, or naïve artistic production. The panelists will propose ways of thinking about the broader implications of visual arts (photography, film, sculpture, paintings, tapestries) and how they contribute to the recollection and revival of images for a charismatic leader, founder of a Nation, benevolent savior of the people, and liberator of women.
About the panelists:
William Granara is research professor of Arabic at Harvard University in the departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Comparative Literature. Granara specializes in the literature and history of the Arab Mediterranean in both the medieval and modern periods. He writes extensively on Muslim Sicily, and has authored two monographs, Narrating Muslim Sicily: War and Peace in the Medieval Mediterranean World (2019) and Ibn Hamdis the Sicilian: Eulogist for a Falling Homeland (2021). He is also co-editor of the recently published The Thousand and One Nights: Sources and Transformations in Literature, Art, and Science (2020)
Jessica Gerschultz is an Associate Professor in the Department of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas. Her research examines modern and contemporary art, gender and craft, and feminist art histories and methodologies. Jessica was an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow in 2016 for the writing of her first book Decorative Arts of the Tunisian École: Fabrications of Modernism, Gender, and Power (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019). She has published articles and essays, most recently in Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today (Oxford University Press, 2020), The Journal of Modern Craft(2020), and The Art Salon in the Arab Region: Politics of Taste Making (Beiruter Texte und Studien, 2018).
Iheb Guermazi is an architect, author and architectural historian. He received his PhD in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was affiliated with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. He also holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Carthage in Tunisia and completed, as a Fulbright Scholar, a Master in the History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Washington. His academic work focuses on modern Sufi art and architectural discourses, the question of sin and morality in Islamic urbanism, and the place of postmodern architectural theory in postcolonial contexts.
Beya Othmani is an independent art curator based in Tunis. She is a member of the curatorial ensemble of the Berlin/Milan/Dakar-based organization Archive Sites. She holds an M.A from the Berlin School of Fine Arts (KHB) and a B.A from McGill University, Montreal, from the department of Middle Eastern Studies. She is currently a recipient of the CAORC/Andrew Mellon Art History fellowship. Her research focuses on exhibition histories, curatorial practice and exhibition-making strategies in North Africa, with an emphasis on Tunisia and the Tunisian State.
|| Monday, October 10th, 2022 || 4:30 to 7:00PM (Tunis) || In-person || Admission free || Face masks required indoors
