Despite numerous studies on identity in Arabic novels, the dialectical relationship between language, culture, and identity has received insufficient sociodiscursive analysis in Kuwaiti novels. This research addresses this gap by examining how literary texts construct identity through representations of self and other, belonging, and social conflict, and explores intersections between identity and culture through language, tracing how language represents individual and collective identity in Kuwaiti fiction and highlighting religious and social motives’ roles in preserving language as fundamental to identity. It provides a critical, applied reading of Alsanousi’s novels as examples reflecting the problems of identity in Kuwaiti society. A sociodiscursive analytical approach is applied through analysis of The Bamboo Stalk and Mama Hissa’s Mice to examine their implications for belonging, conflict, and class and sectarian differences. Drawing on previous studies, the analysis focuses on lexical choices, narrative voices, and forms of dialogue as key sociodiscursive indicators of identity construction. Language in Alsanousi’s novels serves as both a communicative function and a semantic space for conflict and belonging, contributing to reshaping self-awareness and social awareness; revealing class and sectarian disparities within social structures; and establishing identity as a shifting discursive construct influenced by cultural, religious, and social contexts.
The following paper describes and critically evaluates the approach of the contemporary Czech Republic to the restitution of works of art confiscated under the pressure of Nazi-persecution. This is achieved by a brief analysis of the legislation and general restitution case law before the adoption of Act No. 212/2000 Coll., as amended, and by a summary of the international principles on Nazi-confiscated Art, which are then compared with the recent Czech approach. The focus is placed on law regulation and related case law, references to foreign experience are rather illustrative. Finally, the Czech legislation is briefly evaluated and some ‘de lege ferenda’ proposals as well as some practical recommendations for institutions holding Czech state collections are given.
Schmidt, J. (2014). Thirteen Years in Istanbul (1937-1949). German Assyriologist Fritz Rudolf Kraus and His Correspondences in Turkish Exile. Leiden: Brill. Vol.1: xx, 906 pp.; Vol.2: vi, 848 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-25774-0
With similar political views and shared interests in the visual arts, dance, and music, these artists found commonality and took inspiration from one another's aesthetic and social concerns.
Artikkeli tarkastelee insinöörisuunnittelua sekä puutarha- ja maisemasuunnittelua suomalaisen taidehistorian marginaaleissa. Näin selvitetään, mitä niiden asemointi tutkimuksen kenttään kertoo alan institutionaalisista rajoista. Taidehistorian tutkimusalue määritellään nykyisin laajasti sekä taiteellisia että muita ilmiöitä käsittäväksi. Artikkelissa kuitenkin pohdimme, onko hierarkkinen jako taiteeseen ja ei-taiteeseen silti edelleen voimassa. Taide tutkimuskohteena määrittelee yhä tieteenalan identiteettiä ja jäsentyy edelleen kaanoneina. Vaikka niin puutarha- ja maisemasuunnittelu kuin insinöörisuunnittelu on kelpuutettu kotimaisen taidehistorian tutkimuskohteiksi, sen piirissä ylläpidetään silti näiden alojen ja arkkitehtuurin välistä erottelua. Tarkastelu osoittaa alan kaksijakoisen suhteen muihin kuin taiteellisiin tutkimuskohteisiin. Ne voidaan hyväksyä, mutta niiden näkyvyys taiteen kaanoniin yhä perustuvissa alan yleisteoksissa tai opetussisällöissä on satunnaista.
Un vaso recientemente adquirido por el Estado para el Museo Arqueológico Nacional, un ánfora apulia de figuras rojas del Pintor de Baltimore, fechada entre 330 y 320 a. C., nos permite realizar, a través de la lectura de sus imágenes, un recorrido por los paisajes infernales y paradisíacos del imaginario suritálico. El programa iconográfico e ideológico de este vaso, decorado con una escena de naiskos, una escena con personajes junto a una estela funeraria y una escena con la visita de Orfeo a los Infiernos, incide en un mensaje claramente salvífico, ofreciendo la promesa para los difuntos de una nueva existencia, edénica e inmortal, más allá de la muerte.
History of the arts, Museums. Collectors and collecting
The history of Al Ahsa is shown in the folk arts produced by productive families where they respond to the needs of the society in which we live. The research aims to emphasize the importance of the handicrafts of productive families in the tourism revitalization of Al Ahsa in line with the Saudi Vision 2030. The research has been divided into several parts starting with the definition of research, problem, objectives, hypotheses, importance, limits, methodology and research terms with a theoretical review, followed by technical analysis of the proposed designs. Also, 12 design ideas were done, accompanied by technical analysis and employment models to reach the results and recommendations. The research methodology is based on the descriptive approach of handicrafts and the experimental analytical method in producing contemporary art designs inspired by folklore. This study shows the importance of the productive families in increasing the national income by their handicraft and the income of beneficiaries that effect on the economic and social stability of the individual.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
La puerta septentrional de la iglesia románica de Silos, hoy desaparecida, contaba con un programa decorativo único en el arte románico. El presente trabajo pretende analizar la forma en la que la antigua liturgia hispana fue capaz de condicionar su mensaje iconográfico. Para esto se propondrán relaciones entre los relieves y los manuscritos hispanos que, finalmente, nos permitirán considerar el ciclo de la Navidad del antiguo rito como la inspiración del programa decorativo.
Abstract
The north entrance of the Romanesque church of Silos, now disappeared, had a unique decorative programme in Romanesque art. The present work seeks to analyze the way in which the ancient Hispanic liturgy was able to condition its iconographic message. To this end, we propose relationships between the sculptures and Hispanic manuscripts, which will finally allow us to consider the Christmas cycle of the ancient rite as the inspiration for the decorative programme.
This article analyzes a Passion cycle signed and dated in 1744 by the notorious New Spanish painter José de Ibarra. The set of 15 canvases, now in a private collection, had not been catalogued in the work of the master. The cycle was acquired by an important Spanish merchant, active in the port of Veracruz in the second half of the eighteenth century. The cycle illustrates considerations on cultural transfers in the Hispanic world of the era and raises questions in relation to global models of communication and exchange. The series is analyzed from Transatlantic perspectives, including the appropriation by the New Spanish painter of Flemish and Italians engravings.
The case of Nineteenth-century Danish dance history is a relevant field of research both for Cultural Studies on ego-documents and for Dance Studies on dancers’ memoires, because it allows to understand the personal and local experience of the canon of the French danse d’école, in relation to the etical and aesthetic normative pressures of Europe at the time. The paper reconstructs the Bildungsroman of the well-known dancer, coreoghrapher and intellectual August Bournonville (Copenhagen 1805-1879), during his educational years in Paris, in order to analyse its project of identity construction, personal and professional as well as social and institutional, based on the sources collected in the Danish archives and their enactment in the memories and cultural history of dance, both at a local and international level.
The objective of the present article is to re-work and radically reframe a case study on drawing presented at the E&PDE conference, hosted by OsloMet in the early autumn of 2017. The case study was experimental – involving a drawer, a furniture designer, an MA student (at the time) and an anthropologist. The present article ventures to draw certain learning outcomes from the experiment. These are presently relevant in the context of the heritage of a drawing school founded in 1818 and in the wake of the current activities in artistic research (AR) at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO). The focus is on the educational aspects of ‘doing research’. The article queries the relation between drawing, writing and field research in the history of the school and currently in AR.
Keywords: drawing, writing, field research, process, reframing, case study, comparison, first science, third-party readability, non-philosophy.
Sustainability education (SE) is included in school curricula to integrate the principles, values, and practices of sustainable development (SD) into all education. This study investigates lower secondary school subject teachers as educators for sustainability. A survey was used to study the perceptions of 442 subject teachers from 49 schools in Finland. There were significant differences between the subject teachers’ perceptions of their SE competence, and the frequency with which they used different dimensions of SE (ecological, economic, social, well-being, cultural) in their teaching varied. Teachers’ age had a small effect, but gender, school, and its residential location were nonsignificant factors. Teachers could be roughly classified into three different subgroups according to their perceptions of the role of SE in their teaching; those who considered three SE dimensions rather often and used holistic sustainability approaches in their teaching (biology, geography, history); those who considered two or three dimensions often but were not active in holistic teaching (mother tongue, religion, visual arts, crafts, music, physical and health education, and home economics) and those who used one SE dimension or consider only one holistic approach in their teaching (mathematics, physics, chemistry and language). Subject teachers’ awareness of their SE competence is important to encourage them to plan and implement discipline-based and interdisciplinary SE in their teaching. The specific SE expertise of subject teachers should be taken into account in teacher training and education.
The article focuses on a brief moment in the practice of Jacek Kryszkowski when in 1985 he withdrawed his input from Tango magazine published collectively by a group of neodadaist artists. The decision was based on a conclusion that the Pitch-In Culture in which he was previously involved was not radically changing the field of art because it was sill based on commodity fetishism. Kryszkowski founded a magazine with a different title where he mainly published his own articles of diverse structure and contents. Kryszkowski tried to substitute ‘object making’ with ‘description of attitude’ which he considered the proper work of art. This was an implementation of his idea of a Personal Point of Observation and Shaping Artistic Flora as artistic practice that worked within and on the institutional framework of art. The gesture of withdrawal from art in favour of writing is juxtaposed in the article with the contrary move of Marcel Broodthaers. A specific elegiac tone of some of his 1985 writings also suggests that he employed a special historical politics that was similar to effects used by Guy Debord to reclaim ‘spectacular time’. The article thus reveals Kryszkowski as an artist conscious of reification processes and inventive in terms of creating new types of distribution of art and ideas on art, thereby trying to find new possibilities for art creativity in a postconceptual era.
History of the arts, History (General) and history of Europe
Gentile da Fabriano’s Annunciation in the Vatican Pinacoteca is one of the clearest and most interesting visualizations of a famous metaphor from Medieval hymn literature that compares Mary’s hymen to the glass of a window. The painting uniquely combines three elements: rays of light, a Gothic tracery window, and the shape of the window impressed on the Virgin’s body. Gentile’s painting is the culmination of a development in Tuscan art that can be traced back at least until about 1370. This makes it part of an Italian tradition of visualizing the so-called ut vitrum metaphor that must antedate analogous examples from Flemish art.