Jochen Sokoly
Dr. Jochen Sokoly is Associate Professor of Art History of the Islamic World at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar where he has taught since 2004, and as Gallery Director between 2005-2011 also curated numerous exhibitions on art and design, as well as lecture series. In 2019 he was co-chair of the 9th Hamad bin-Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art held at VCUQatar. He has been an Aga Khan Fellow at Harvard, a Leo and Julia Forchheimer Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and a Veronica Gervers Fellow the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, and has worked as a UNESCO curatorial consultant for the Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait National Museum, Kuwait for which he is preparing a publication on the museum’s collection of early Islamic inscribed textiles. As a Fellow and currently member of Council of the Royal Asiatic Society Dr. Sokoly has published on British India, particularly a collection of 18th century botanical drawings and paintings by the Indian company-school painter Zayn al-Din, formerly in the collection of Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones. With the Society’s Director, Dr. Alison Ohta, he co-curated an exhibition at VCUQatar of mostly unpublished works from the RAS collection relating to Indian/British artistic relations during the Age of Enlightenment. Dr. Sokoly has also been instrumental in planning and realizing the establishment of the Department of Art History at VCUQatar, with an undergraduate degree program that focuses on Islamic Art in a global context. Dr. Sokoly studied at both the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and the University of Oxford, Lincoln College where he received his DPhil in the Arts and Architecture of the Islamic World. His primary research interests focus mainly on the material culture of the early caliphates, particularly within the context of court and administration. As Aga Khan Fellow in 2020 he is preparing for publication a monograph on early Islamic inscribed textiles (tiraz) as well as conduct research on the administration of tiraz in early Islamic al-Andalus.
Supervisors: Dr. Julian Raby and Luke Treadwell
Supervisors: Dr. Julian Raby and Luke Treadwell
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The Qatar Now series features the work of emerging and established Qatari artists and designers. A graphic designer by profession, Manar al-Muftah is also a graduate of VCUQatar.
It is the first time that The Gallery is featuring the work of an alumna in a solo exhibition at The Gallery.
This contrast in content is mirrored by the artist’s choice of different media. While the first is comprised of paintings executed in gouache and pastel, the second consists of photo-collages. Cultivate Your Garden, on the other hand, is a work that reflects on the artist’s life after he left his homeland. In the exhibition, Cultivate Your Garden is placed between the two constituent parts of Elusive Homelands.
This sequence mirrors, as it were, the artist’s own history of emigration: first, his reflection on the mythical past of his homeland; then his own migration; then his reflection on the lives of fellow immigrants in Halfiax.
has tried to overcome the existing rift between historians and textile specialists,
in approaching the subject in a more unified way, which takes into account the
interrelationship between production, administration and use. Historians have
traditionally worked on the textile industry and administration from the point of
view of Arabic literary sources, while textile specialists focused on the material
evidence of fabrics and their manufacture.
Rather than relying on one collection, as most previous authors have done,
samples from all the major museum collections are examined here and have
been arranged in a database of 1823 items, which made it possible to analyse
the properties of textiles taxonomically. By using taxonomic analysis both
material and historical information could be combined and emerging trends
tested against the historical evidence of literary sources. A major discovery here
has been how the textile evidence reflects administrative changes in control of
the textile industry and the wider administrative relationship between Egypt and
Iraq under the Abbasids.
While there is agreement by both textile specialists and historians that tiraz
textiles were produced for court consumption, neither considered the question
why tiraz textiles were used in burials, from which most surviving tiraz textiles
have in fact been recovered archaeologically. This thesis approaches this
subject by considering both material and literary evidence and suggests that
tiraz textiles were regarded as a source of blessing for the deceased because of
their caliphal association recorded in their inscriptions.
The Qatar Now series features the work of emerging and established Qatari artists and designers. A graphic designer by profession, Manar al-Muftah is also a graduate of VCUQatar.
It is the first time that The Gallery is featuring the work of an alumna in a solo exhibition at The Gallery.
This contrast in content is mirrored by the artist’s choice of different media. While the first is comprised of paintings executed in gouache and pastel, the second consists of photo-collages. Cultivate Your Garden, on the other hand, is a work that reflects on the artist’s life after he left his homeland. In the exhibition, Cultivate Your Garden is placed between the two constituent parts of Elusive Homelands.
This sequence mirrors, as it were, the artist’s own history of emigration: first, his reflection on the mythical past of his homeland; then his own migration; then his reflection on the lives of fellow immigrants in Halfiax.
has tried to overcome the existing rift between historians and textile specialists,
in approaching the subject in a more unified way, which takes into account the
interrelationship between production, administration and use. Historians have
traditionally worked on the textile industry and administration from the point of
view of Arabic literary sources, while textile specialists focused on the material
evidence of fabrics and their manufacture.
Rather than relying on one collection, as most previous authors have done,
samples from all the major museum collections are examined here and have
been arranged in a database of 1823 items, which made it possible to analyse
the properties of textiles taxonomically. By using taxonomic analysis both
material and historical information could be combined and emerging trends
tested against the historical evidence of literary sources. A major discovery here
has been how the textile evidence reflects administrative changes in control of
the textile industry and the wider administrative relationship between Egypt and
Iraq under the Abbasids.
While there is agreement by both textile specialists and historians that tiraz
textiles were produced for court consumption, neither considered the question
why tiraz textiles were used in burials, from which most surviving tiraz textiles
have in fact been recovered archaeologically. This thesis approaches this
subject by considering both material and literary evidence and suggests that
tiraz textiles were regarded as a source of blessing for the deceased because of
their caliphal association recorded in their inscriptions.
“Elusive Homelands” is an exhibition of a series of photo collages and paintings created by the Lebanese-Canadian artist Camille Zakharia. In this body of work Zakharia, who currently lives in Bahrain and has been a migrant himself, documents the living environment of a number of immigrant Middle Eastern families in Nova Scotia, Canada.
This exhibition addresses some of the major personal issues most immigrants have to live through and their acculturation in their new land of residence. The works are the result of a project to document the stories of immigration of Arab families and individuals from the Near East, particularly Lebanon, in the Canadian City of Halifax, undertaken by Camille Zakharia in the late 1990’s. The works represent Zakharia’s interpretation of the personal histories and current circumstances of each of the families, and draw on some distorted memories of his own childhood and the lives of the people who lived in those memories. The most recurrent themes that appear in these works are the concept of time; the strength of, and the support provided by the extended family; the loss of loved ones for no understandable reason; the keeping alive of false hopes amid the destruction of war; and the sense of futility and impotence as the educated young are drained away from their own country to the West. Migration from one country to another often results in a fragmentation of identity, a feature that predominates in all the families shown in this series. Displacement, nostalgia, and the search for home with a quest for a place to fit in are furthermore intrinsic issues addressed by these works. The unforeseeable and unfortunate war in the Summer of 2006 that urged thousands of Lebanese and foreign citizens to leave Lebanon and seek shelter abroad, has once more brought back into public memory the exodus that had happened during that country’s civil war between 1975-1990. The current exhibition could not be more relevant than at this very moment in time. A catalog accompanying the exhibition explains the exhibited works in some detail and contains a number of essays.
The present exhibition shows a number of past works, notably large-scale figural paintings and drawings on paper and canvas and also a sequence of studies and experimental drawings. In addi tion, it contains a large work in charcoal on paper created by Dr. Abu-Rub especially for this exhibition. Dr. Abu-Rub’s main subject, the human figure, is usually represented in large congested groups, sometimes painfully intertwined. While in his charcoal drawings the human form is more realistically drawn, in his large-scale acrylic paintings it is represented in an abstracted fashion. However, his figures are always anonymous, enabling the viewer to project himself into the scene. The forward and upward movement in the over all arrangement reminds one of that of the groups of figures represented in paintings such as Pablo Picasso’s Guernica or Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Both of these paintings are about human suffering and the quest for hope and relief. The movement of the figures represented in Dr. Abu-Rub’s drawings and paintings is a direct result of Dr. Abu-Rub’s technique. In both paintings and drawings he involves his whole body in creating strong lines that are reminiscent of the technique used in American Action Painting. Usually Dr. Abu-Rub’s work is executed on huge lengths of paper or canvas, sometimes up to 50 meters. This, together with his use of large handmade chunks of charcoal, allows him to complete a work in a matter of hours. While working, it appears as if the figures flow out of Dr. Abu-Rub’s arms and are the direct result of his inner vision.
If I were given the length of the globe and a thousand years to tell about the Palestinian cause, it would not be enough. (Al-Akhbar, Amman, 28 November 1980)