Annual Conference 2015: Revealing/Concealing: (in)visibility in premodern societies

Anmeldung

This year’s eikones annual conference is dedicated to the concepts of revealing and concealing in pre-modern societies. The eikones annual conference 2015 invites to examine the various strategies of revealing and concealing in pre-modern societies, and to analyse pagan and Christian iconic practices critically through comparison. Methodologically, the conference will have an anthropological, comparativist bent, in order to explore the dyad of revealing and concealing through its terminological history and to define it more precisely in its historical and individual conditions. The focus on the pre-modern period means considering strategies of visualization beyond a modern conception of art; but in precisely this way the conference intends to make a contribution to a nuanced understanding of the term “image” in the sphere of its use as well as its historical processes of transformation. An investigation into processes of revealing and concealing aimed at a deeper understanding of image processes in ancient cultures should be aware of an inherent difficulty in dealing with these questions, i.e. the precise domain of image itself. What is and what is not an „image“ should not be solely determined by implicitly modern presumptions. Instead, a certain experimental aspect in presenting this matter is welcome, through the analysis of which we would learn to see the relevance of possibly remote phenomena for what might later be considered an „image“ or an image-related process. Furthermore the conference’s approach comprises explicitly a wide range of different cultures and societies by considering the phenomenal realm of revealing and concealing as specific to various forms of image practices as well as to the development of certain figures of thoughts in the pre-modern period apart from a Eurocentric epochal term. In this respect the conference aims to broaden the interdisciplinary exchange of different academic disciplines like Sinology, Egyptology, Art History, Ancient, Medieval and Byzantine Studies, Archaeology and others by identifying distinct historical, cultural and social phenomena of coming or bringing into manifestation and of enshrouding, both in their emerging conceptual as well as procedural/ritual aspect.

Program