The Art of Collecting Architecture

Elective, Fall 2017
Mari Lending and Tim Anstey

Napoleon Frontispeice_2At the beginning of the nineteenth century, an influx of images of the landscapes, inhabitants and monuments of Egypt saturated European culture on an unprecedented scale. Soon, heavy physical parts of that landscape fabric were relocated to Western centres, while this like transfer, in turn, was accompanied by a flood of weightless images: newspaper reports, letters, and artists’ representation. For a European audience, the remote was brought close in a triple process of transfer: through images of fixed and distant objects that circulated in Western homes; through the transportation of gargantuan physical objects across continents, collapsing the sense of distance and bringing the Egyptian past into sensory contact with domestic Europe; and through the circulation of images that recounted the transfer of these objects, of the odysseys and adventures that attended their travel. This MA seminar, part of the PriArc project, is a continuation of the Images of Egypt seminar in the spring 2017, and will conceptualize the exhibition Images of Egypt (Museum of Cultural History Oslo, Fall 2018), and a book with the same title.

 
 

Originally posted Sep 5, 2017. Latest revision Sep 7, 2017.

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