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TASWIR |
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TASWIR in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman-Turkish, Hindi, and Urdu means “image making”, “picturing”, “representation”.The pictorial atlas TASWIR is based upon the Berlin exhibition TASWIR 2009 / 2010 and is currently developed into an encyclopedic, fractal image portal. The Principle of Free Association The clusters of the TASWIR atlas with their associated objects initially corresponded to the 18 exhibition rooms of the TASWIR exhibition. We currently explore the possibility of presenting various ways in which knowledge may be organized through pictorial mapping of diverse artistic and literary material, enlarging upon the original setting of the exhibition. In the TASWIR atlas, an open number of artifacts and positions, via a matrix of attributes, can enter into variable and dynamic relations with each other. Warburg and the Displacement of the Display Walls The TASWIR atlas simulates the ‘displacement of the display walls’, a gesture with which art historianAby Warburg, when preparing the project of his pictorial atlas Mnemosyne, kept extending, relocating and regrouping his books, pictures and images in the Library of Cultural Sciences in Hamburg.[1] |
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Relocating the Axis of Modernity However, ha’atelier playfully relocates the European axis of Modernity which Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlas projected mainly upon objects from the Renaissance and classical Greek antiquity. In variation, TASWIR positions classical exhibits and topics from Islamic and Jewish traditions as constituents of a contemporary order of things that can no longer be called Western. “I Have Nothing to Say Only to Show” Like in the classical traditions of Hadith, Talmud and Midrash, seemingly accidental clusters of material are arranged according to latent and subcutaneous semantic correlations between them. To put it differently: The chains of visual associations clustering in the nodal points of TASWIR are brought to light by a method that is similar to the free association used in psychoanalysis and to the literary montage developed in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’: ‘Method of this work: literary montage. I have nothing to say only to show.’[2] Displacements, dissociations, inversions of meaning, etc. are phenomena equally characteristic of the Talmud and Freud’s dream interpretation, of Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’ and TASWIR. |
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Arabic and Judeo–Arabic Teachings of Indeterminacy The matrix structuring this process is modeled after 10th to 13th century Arabic and Judeo–Arabic theories of “relative attributes”, advocating the indeterminacy and relativity of human knowledge concerning the divine subject.[3] Arabic and Judeo–Arabic classical scholasticism negated any essential attributes with respect to the divine. What the TASWIR atlas does – as Jewish and Islamic traditions have done before – is to substitute material objects for the divine subject, to “bend” its attributes towards the materiality of the object. What emanates from the correspondences emerging from the matrix of attributes is a variable cartography, an arrangement of objects which suggests an open ended associative process of a non-linear order.
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