Intersections: Zainab Bahrani

Zainab Bahrani is the Edith Porada Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York. Bahrani is a specialist in ancient art and archaeology and the recipient of several awards for her work including a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship, and awards from the Getty Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her most recent book, The Infinite Image: Art, Time and the Aesthetic Dimension in Antiquity (Reaktion/University of Chicago Press, 2014) won the Lionel Trilling Book prize. Her forthcoming book, Art of Mesopotamia (Thames and Hudson) will be released in January 2017.

Bahrani presents "Methexis Images: A Counter History of Art." From the ontology of images to the art of the sublime, Mesopotamian art works and the many ancient texts that describe them, their function and their effects, compel us to unthink our theoretical preconceptions and aesthetic categories. This lecture will present methexis as a representational mode that is quite different from mimesis, the concept around which the history of art and philosophical theories of representation have been written. This early history of the image shows that universalizing aesthetic claims will obviously be flawed unless they take into account the extensive historical evidence from non-European traditions.

IMAGE: M. Van De Mieroop

Intersections is co-sponsored by the Anderson Collection, Cantor Arts Center, and the Department of Art and Art History