Category Archives: Blog

Tomorrow We Disappear
Tribeca Film Festival
April 19th-25th

The puppeteers, performers, and magicians of the Kathputli colony in Delhi are the last slumdweller–artists of their kind. When their land is sold to high-rise developers, they fight to keep their mystical Indian folk arts alive and to conserve what beauty remains as they are forced into someone else’s vision of the future. Tomorrow We Disappear is not just documentation but an extraordinary act of preservation.

For more information, please click here.

Journey to the West
Tribeca Film Festival
April 24th-26th

A meditation loosely based on the classical Chinese story by Wu Cheng’en, this groundbreaking new interpretation brings the legendary pilgrimage of a Buddhist monk into the present tense. Tsai Ming Liang bids us to look and listen, providing a timeless take on the spiritual journey of an individual in constant negotiation with the self and the substrate in which he finds himself. Journey to the West proposes that true enlightenment awaits those who endure.

For more information, please click here.

This film will be shown next week in Beirut as part of A Rupture of Amnesia: The Lebanese Civil War Memorial Week.

Xi'an Mosque (Photo: John Emigh)

The ocean is pure and clean in its origin demanding the wind.
The waves support the turtles and dragons.
The waves of universal compassion subside,
and compassion alone arises…

— Displaying the Concealment of the Real Realm

Capoeira in Cappadocia (Photo: Emily O'Dell)

Sorcery of slaves longing for liberty, its beginning has no method,
and its end is inconceivable to the wisest capoeirista…

— Mestre Pastinha

On safari (Photo: Emily O'Dell)

To read a review of the memoir “Cathedral of the Wild: An African Journey Home,” please click here.

Now in Brooklyn...

In Pursuit of Freedom is a multifaceted public history initiative that explores the everyday heroes of Brooklyn’s anti-slavery movement. This major, long-term exhibit explores the lesser-known activists of Brooklyn’s anti-slavery movement — Brooklynites, black and white — who shaped their community, city, and nation with a revolutionary vision of freedom and equality. The exhibit is part of the groundbreaking In Pursuit of Freedom public history project that features new research on Brooklyn’s abolition movement in partnership with Weeksville Heritage Center and Irondale Ensemble Project.

To learn more about this exhibition, please click here.

Slavery by Another Name
Brooklyn Historical Society
Tuesday, April 8, 2014 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM (EDT)

The final film in our four-part Created Equal film series, Slavery by Another Name, explores different forms of forced labor after the Civil War. Following the film, Josh Saunders, Senior Trial Attorney at Brooklyn Defenders Services, connects its themes to issues today.

Umayyad Mosque of Damascus (Photo: Emily O'Dell)

This lecture will explore the results of a new research on the history of Damascus markets during the Middle Ages with particular attention to the surrounding souks of the Umayyad Mosque. Breaking for good with the long lasting vision of a static and hierarchical organization of the markets around the congregational mosque in the “Islamic city”, it will examine the changes that occurred in their display between the 12th and 16th centuries. The exploitation of historical sources mentioning the souks will lead us to identify shifts. The analysis of the topography of the markets will allow to appreciate progress or decline of the crafts and commercial activities. The aim of this approach is to complete our knowledge of the mamluk economic context. More specifically, it seeks to enlighten the medium-term consequences -on the craft production and trade- of the destruction of Damascus by the troops of the mongol chief Tamerlane in 1400.

For more information, please click here.

Topkapi Palace Library (Photo: Emily O'Dell)

The Ottoman Palace Library Inventory of 1502-3
Harvard University Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
April 4th-6th, 2014

This workshop focuses on a unique manuscript, in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which is a catalogue in Arabic of the holdings of the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul, compiled for Sultan Bayezid II by his royal librarian in the year 909 (1502-3). The presentations are preliminary versions of essays that will be published in the Supplements to Muqarnas Series (Brill, Leiden and Boston) of the Aga Khan Program of Islamic Architecture at Harvard…The aim of the workshop is to appraise what was collected, along with an assessment of early sixteenth-century Ottoman intellectual culture from the viewpoint of the royal palace library, with its “universal” collection of approximately 5700 volumes and 7200 titles in all branches of knowledge, written in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman and Chaghatay Turkish.

For more information, please click here.