International Institute Conference

9:00 am – Opening Remarks

Mary Gallagher, International Institute Director and Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights, University of Michigan

9:15 - 11:00 am – Devotion and Art in Contemporary Times

Recorded UMMA Presentation (5 mins)

Moderator: David Doris, Associate Professor, History of Art, University of Michigan

Panelists:

Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, Art Historian and Curator, Singapore Art Museum
Monuments in Meme Time: Ritual, Design, and the 2020 Thai Protests

Sascha Crasnow, Lecturer, Islamic Arts and Culture in the Arts and Ideas in the Humanities Program; Affiliate Faculty in Arab and Muslim American Studies and Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Michigan
Al-Buraq: Explorations of Liminality in Contemporary Islamic Art

Christopher Sheklian, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Comparative Religious Studies, Radboud University
Resonances of Armenian Liturgical Music from the Minaret to the Concert Hall

11:00 am - 12:00 pm – Break

12:00 - 2:20 pm – Global Perspectives on Pre-modern Devotional Arts

Recorded UMMA Presentation (5 mins)

Moderator:

Panelists:

Lihong Liu, Sally Michelson Davidson Assistant Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures, University of Michigan
Vitreous Containers and the Aura of Religious Objects

Orna Tsultem, Assistant Professor, Edgar and Dorothy Fehnel Chair in International Studies, Indiana University Herron School of Art & Design
From Stone Sculptures to Imperial Portraits: Ancestral Worship and Acts of Devotion in Mongolia​

Brendan McMahon, Assistant Professor in History of Art, University of Michigan
The Matter of Impermanence: Taxonomies of Mutable Color in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Suzanne Davis, Associate Curator and Head of Conservation, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan
Graffiti as Social Devotion in Ancient Sudan

Adrian Deese, 2019 LSA Collegiate Fellow and Lecturer, Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan
Early Yoruba Religious Tracts as Devotional Arts in Nigeria

2:20 - 3:00 pm – Break

3:00 -  4:00 pm – Keynote & Closing Remarks

Recorded UMMA PRESENTATION (5 mins)

Keynote Speaker: Duncan Ryuken Williams, Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages & Cultures; Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, University of Southern California
The Making of the Ireihi: A Monument to the WWII Japanese American Incarceration

Sascha Crasnow (she/her) is Lecturer of Islamic Arts in the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She writes on global contemporary art practices, with a particular focus on SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa), race, socio-politics, gender, and sexuality. Her book project, The Age of Disillusionment: Palestinian Art After the Intifadas, is under review with Duke University Press. Today’s talk stems from research that will be published as an essay in the forthcoming edited volume A Strange Place Still? Religion in Contemporary Art to be published by Routledge in 2022.

Suzanne Davis is the associate curator of conservation at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan, where she oversees preservation of the museum’s 100,000+ ancient artifacts and historic building. She directs conservation efforts for several Kelsey excavation projects, including El-Kurru and Jebel Barkal, Sudan. With Geoff Emberling, she is a co-curator of the recent exhibition, Graffiti as Devotion along the Nile, and an author and co-editor of the accompanying anthology. Her research interests include ancient craft production, archaeological conservation, and visitor and community experience of archaeological sites.

Adrian M. Deese is an LSA Collegiate Fellow in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research focuses on the history of interreligious dialogue in nineteenth-century West Africa. He earned a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge in England. He completed master’s degrees in History (2015) and Africana Studies (2013) at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He is a native of Atlanta, Georgia, where he received a B.A. in History at Georgia State University. Dr. Deese was previously a U.S. Fulbright Scholar (2015-2016) at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Lihong Liu is Sally Michelson Davidson Assistant Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Liu studied Buddhist and Daoist arts at Peking University, and Chinese paintings and material and visual culture of the Ming and Qing periods (1368–1911) at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University where she earned her doctorate. Liu's current research concerns the interaction between art and environment, transcultural studies of material media, and the art of simulation and automation. 

Brendan McMahon is an assistant professor in the department of history of art at the University of Michigan. Prior to his appointment, he held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Michigan Society of Fellows, which he joined after completing his PhD at the University of Southern California in 2017. McMahon is currently revising a book manuscript that explores the cultural histories of iridescent materials in the early modern Spanish world.

Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol is an art historian and Curator at Singapore Art Museum. He holds a PhD from the University of Michigan and previously held fellowships at Tate Britain and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. His current work investigates the transformation of craft, design, and indigenous knowledge in the face of new digital literacies in Southeast Asia. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Aperture, British Art Studies, and Oxford Art Journal.

Christopher Sheklian is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Radboud University in the Netherlands, part of the “Rewriting Global Orthodoxy" Project in the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religion. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago with his dissertation, “Theology and the Community: The Armenian Minority, Tradition, and Secularism in Turkey.” From 2018-2020, Dr. Sheklian served as the Director of the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center at the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America. He has been a Manoogian Post-Doctoral Fellow in Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, an Adjunct Professor at St. Nersess Armenian Seminary, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University. He has published work on liturgy and law in the lives of religious minorities, including “Promises of Property: Religious Foundations and the Justice and Development Party’s Ambiguous Attitudes towards Religious Minorities” in the journal Turkish Studies. Currently, he is working on a monograph entitled Singing the City: The Armenian Liturgical Subject and Minority Belonging in Istanbul.

Uranchimeg (Orna) Tsultem (PhD, UC Berkeley) is a scholar of Mongolian art and culture. She is Edgar and Dorothy Fehnel Chair in International Studies and Assistant Professor at Indian University’s Herron School of Art and Design. Prior to Herron, she served as Co-Chair of the Mongolia Initiative Program at the Institute of East Asian Studies at UC Berkeley. She taught Asian art courses at UC Berkeley, the National University of Mongolia, Yonsei University in South Korea, and the University of Iceland.

Orna’s publications include six books in Mongolia, exhibition catalog essays for two museums in Finland (2010-11); Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (1999, 2012); Ethnography Museum in Warsaw, Poland (2011). Her recent academic articles were published in South Asian Studies (UK), Artibus Asiae (Switzerland), Third Text (UK), and Cross-Currents. Her monograph A Monastery on the Move: Art and Politics in Later Buddhist Mongolia was published by the University of Hawaii Press in December 2020.       

Orna also is an active curator of Mongolian contemporary art who has organized and shown Mongolian art exhibitions internationally since 1997 including HanArt Gallery (Hong Kong, 2011), 9^th Shanghai Biennale (2012), 56^th Venice Biennale (2015), and Sapar Contemporary in NYC in 2019. For her longtime service, Orna was awarded an honorary title “Cultural Envoy of Mongolia” by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia in 2016.

Duncan Ryūken Williams is the Chair of the USC School of Religion and Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. Previously, he held the Ito Distinguished Chair of Japanese Buddhism at UC Berkeley and served as the Director of Berkeley’s Center for Japanese Studies. Williams is the author of the LA Times bestseller American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019) about Buddhism and the WWII Japanese American internment; The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Sōtō Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan (Princeton University Press, 2005), and editor of 7 books including Issei Buddhism in the Americas, American Buddhism, Hapa Japan, and Buddhism and Ecology.

Monuments in Meme Time: Ritual, Design, and the 2020 Thai Protests

Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, Art Historian and Curator, Singapore Art Museum

Champions of Thai constitutionalism have recently rediscovered a potent political symbol in the form of the People’s Party Plaque, a small unassuming brass circle once attached to the ground of the Royal Plaza in Bangkok. Public memory of the monument—originally installed in 1936 to commemorate revolutionary victory over absolute monarchy—had largely been suppressed under the official history writing of the royalist Thai state, and the physical plaque quietly removed in 2017. A campaign of willful forgetting seemed successful, that is, until an anonymous group of graphic designers created the “People’s Party Plaque v2” in 2020, unleashing it onto social media platforms as a freely distributed 3D file. Feeding off the energy of the youth-led protests, a cottage industry of creative adaptations quickly emerged—from birthday cakes and Instagram AR filters to talismanic prints to graffiti tags—turning the plaque into a viral symbol of anti-devotional, anti-monarchical politics. Tracking this resurrectional episode in the history of the plaque, I explore what its conditions of virtual production and circulation might tell us, more broadly, about the making of new monuments today.

Al-Buraq: Explorations of Liminality in Contemporary Islamic Art

Sascha Crasnow, Lecturer, Islamic Arts and Culture in the Arts and Ideas in the Humanities Program; Affiliate Faculty in Arab and Muslim American Studies and Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Michigan

In Islamic mythology, the prophet Muhammad journeys from Mecca to Jerusalem to the heavens, hell, and back again in a single night. Al-Buraq, a human-headed flying steed, carries Muhammad on this “Night Journey.” Al-Buraq is a liminal creature: grammatically, al-Buraq is both masculine and feminine; additionally, al-Buraq is able to move between the earthly and spiritual worlds. It is this double fluidity and in-betweenness that makes al-Buraq a figure ripe for exploration of liminality in art, from articulations of queer and trans identities to ambiguities of fact and fiction. This presentation investigates the varying ways contemporary SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) artists have incorporated Al-Buraq into their artistic practices through an analysis of works by Saba Taj, Chaza Charafeddine, and Mohamad Said Baalbaki. It examines the ways in which Saba Taj’s site-specific kinetic sculptural installation Interstellar Uber//Negotiations with God and Chaza Charafeddine’s digitally collaged photographs that comprise her Divine Comedy series utilize al-Buraq’s liminal nature as a means to express, and even celebrate, non-binary and trans identities (their own and others’ respectively). On the other hand, it also investigates how Mohamad Said Baalbaki’s incorporation of al-Buraq into his installation of the same name functions to question the boundaries of fact and fiction in the narratives museum institutions tell. In looking at these various uses of al-Buraq as a means to explore liminality, this presentation draws out why this figure is one to which a number of SWANA artists have turned.

Resonances of Armenian Liturgical Music from the Minaret to the Concert Hall

Christopher Sheklian, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Comparative Religious Studies, Radboud University

Armenian liturgical music has a long and beautiful history within the context of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Some hymns are attributed to St. Sahak, the 5th century head of the Church who also oversaw the creation of an Armenian alphabet. Under the literary and liturgical flourishing that followed, liturgical services and music were some of the first original Armenian language creations after a flurry of translation. Influenced by both the Byzantine and the Syriac modal music systems, the Armenian Church also developed a complex modal liturgical musical system resembling the Octoechos of the Byzantine Church, called the tsayn system. Innovations and compositions continued, with notable figures like St. Gregory of Narek inventing new genres of hymns, and St. Nersess the Gracefilled composing theologically dense acrostics. This liturgical music, especially the genre of the sharakan hymn, has resonated through the ages as a wellspring of Armenian spirituality and creativity. 

This talk gives an introduction to Armenian liturgical music before turning to some of the more recent ways it has resounded beyond its liturgical context. In particular, I explore twentieth century and contemporary compositions that make explicit use of and reference to liturgical music. Komitas Vardapet's ethnographic collections and liturgical compositions have resonated throughout all post-Genocide Armenian music. Beyond the compositions of Komitas, the Armenian jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan and the pianist and composer Arno Babajanyan are among those who use the modal system and often quote other liturgical music. In addition to these contemporary resonances of Armenian liturgical music "in the concert hall," I also explore the ways that Armenian liturgical modal music, in its similarities to both folk compositions and the ezan calling Muslims to prayer, helps to emplace the Armenian ethno-religious minority in the Middle East.

Vitreous Containers and the Aura of Religious Objects

Lihong Liu, Sally Michelson Davidson Assistant Professor of Chinese Arts and Cultures, University of Michigan

Crystal glass containers as novel artefacts in the early modern period acted out their function of containment as miraculous material events. Focusing on glass containers used to contain and constitute Buddhist objects in China's Qing dynasty (1644–1911), this talk examines the modalities and experiences of container and containment as expressed in the Qing court's material, religious and political practices. It argues that glass containers used to simulate, animate and amplify the ‘aura’ of devotional objects manifested more general religio‐political and intercultural phenomena at that time. Those phenomena in turn invite reflections on material objects’ immaterial expressions in terms of the interplay between formal schema and amorphous force.

From Stone Sculptures to Imperial Portraits: Ancestral Worship and Acts of Devotion in Mongolia

Orna Tsultem, Assistant Professor, Edgar and Dorothy Fehnel Chair in International Studies, Indiana University Herron School of Art & Design

A well-known thirteenth-century portrait of Chinggis Khaγan (1162?-1227) is housed in Taipei Palace Museum and was published in numerous occasions in mostly historical books. The portrait is the major image of the Great Khaγan made closer to his lifetime during the Yuan dynasty. Lesser attention, however, was given to the painting from the perspective of portraiture and art-historical analysis.

Several scholars, including Marsha Weidner, Saysiyal, Nyam-Osoryn Tsultem, Shang Gang (尚刚), and Isabelle Charleux, have agreed that the portrait of Chinggis Khaγan is the work by Ho li Huo Sun or Qorγosun (和禮霍孫 fl. 1268-1303), a high ranking Yuan-court government official and a senior member of Hanlin Academy (翰林院) who was known for his achievements during his service. How can we understand this image in relation to Mongol statues of stonemen from Yuan period which Isabelle Charleux (2010) sees as shamanistic ongon? How were the Chinggis Khaγan portraits different from, and similar to ongon? Offering another reading of these portraits, this paper will discuss how these images were important to the establishment of portraiture as an ancestral connection for preservation of Mongol identity not only in modern days (Alicia Campi 2006) but also historically, both within and outside of modern political borders of Mongolia. 

The Matter of Impermanence: Taxonomies of Mutable Color in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Brendan McMahon, Assistant Professor in History of Art, University of Michigan

Iridescent substances—feathers, shells, and mineraloids whose colors appear to change with alterations in the geometries of illumination or view—have long been understood as central to the systems of knowledge and belief that organized the lives of the indigenous inhabitants of the valley of Mexico in the sixteenth century. While previous studies have identified the "brightness" of these materials as a central component of their appeal to the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of this region (glossed today as “Aztecs”), my talk instead considers the mutable nature of their color. It argues that this chromatic impermanence, too, was a property of great value, one that both connected iridescent substances to a variety of other dynamic, vividly colored phenomena and materialized larger ontological truths about the world they inhabited.

Graffiti as Social Devotion in Ancient Sudan

Suzanne Davis, Associate Curator and Head of Conservation, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan

More than 2,000 years ago, people living along the middle stretch of the Nile River began to carve graffiti as acts of devotion. The Middle Nile region extends from Aswan, Egypt, to the confluence of the Blue and White Niles at Khartoum, Sudan, and for much of antiquity the area was known as Kush, the local name of its main political power. Kush was the earliest empire of sub-Saharan Africa (2,000 BCE to 300 CE) and during its last phase, the Meroitic period (ca. 300 BCE to 300 CE), ordinary people began to carve images into the walls of temples and other powerful places in the landscape. Many hundreds of graffiti are concentrated at just a few Meroitic sites, pointing to pilgrimage as an important part of this devotional practice. But because the graffiti are almost entirely pictorial—and executed by individuals with a wide range of artistic skill—their interpretation has been difficult. Scholars are beginning to document and share large sets of devotional graffiti images, making their comparison and analysis possible and providing a window into the lives and hopes of everyday people in ancient Kush. This talk will explore Meroitic graffiti from several sites, with a special focus on those at the royal Kushite cemetery of El-Kurru, Sudan, where a U-M archaeological team has been working since 2013. The El-Kurru graffiti reveal themes related to religion and the natural world and may also document acts of pilgrimage or journeys for which blessings were desired. Because each graffito was planned and carved by an individual, its making was deeply personal, perhaps even meditative. Yet the graffiti are also almost always clustered together, revealing a social aspect important to their creation and placement.

Early Yoruba Religious Tracts as Devotional Arts in Nigeria

Adrian Deese, 2019 LSA Collegiate Fellow and Lecturer, Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan

This paper examines early Yoruba-language print culture in Nigeria as a form of visual art in a global tradition of decorated religious literature. In the traditional production of religious literature, images were utilized to narrate concepts and stories embedded in text to semiliterate societies. The rich traditions of decorated sacred literature include the illuminated Bibles in medieval Europe, illuminated Qurans in the Middle East and North Africa, and illustrated sacred texts in Hinduism and Buddhism in South Asia. The printing press revolution transformed systems of religious authority with the rise of mass-produced sacred texts such as the Gutenberg Bibles, facilitating the Protestant Reformation. The development of a Protestant religious print culture became a central feature of official eighteenth– and nineteenth-century Western engagements with sub-Saharan Africa. Through such transnational interreligious relationships, the Yoruba of western Nigeria produced one of the most extensive bodies of Christian print culture in the history of West Africa. This paper argues that we view early Yoruba religious print as, not simply written text, but also a visual artform that mediated religious diversity in Nigeria and visually wove together a dialogical ethnoreligious iconography. In early times, religion and communal authority were intimately intertwined in western Africa.

Early Yoruba authors invoked images of various types, such as ritual motifs drawn from local divination traditions and even modern photography, to aid in the production of books and to renegotiate traditions of authority. The juxtaposition of sacred icons within a single embroidered text underscored the intrinsic fact of diversity amidst rival claims to legitimate ethnic authority.

The publication of sacred icons was, therefore, central to their reconciliation of royal power and political modernity. This cutting-edge usage of print technology as an artform pioneered ethnoreligious self-articulation and interreligious dialogue as devotional models of civic obligation in modern West Africa.

The Making of the Ireihi: A Monument to the WWII Japanese American Incarceration

Keynote Speaker: Duncan Ryuken Williams, Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages & Cultures; Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, University of Southern California

American Sutra: project to compile a complete list of names of the roughly 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who were incarcerated in various American internment and concentration camps during WWII. It’s never been done before. Ultimately, I’m transforming that list of names into an art-book style registry of names called an “Ireichō” and a sculptural installation of a names monument called the “Ireihi”, both of which are inspired by the Manzanar camp’s “Ireito” (see photo of the structure below and a construction sketch by a Buddhist priest back from 1943). The installation, contemporary version of the gorintō (five-tiered stupa), will be at the center of an exhibit I’m curating for the Japanese American National Museum called “Sutra and Bible” about religion in the WWII camps that will open in October 2021. The bottom cube of the installation will be using light projection to cycle through the 125,000 names in the course of an hour.