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Dr. A. Sh. Bruckstein Çoruh

ha’atelier – platform for philosophy and art

Curriculum VitaeA.S. Bruckstein Coruh

  • Curator of the exhibition “TASWIR – Islamische Bildwelten und Moderne” in the Martin-Gropius-Bau and TASWIR project manager, 2009-2010.
  • Director of the international program Jewish and Islamic hermeneutics as cultural criticism together with Navid Kermani and Angelika Neuwirth at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2002-2005.
  • Rudolf Arnheim Professor at the art-historical seminar of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2003-2004.
  • Martin Buber Professor at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt, 2004-2006. 
  • Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” from October 2010 to September 2011.

 

Research project

The TASWIR project – Rabbinical and Islamic legal traditions and the order of things

The TASWIR project – TASWIR from Arab, Persian, Ottoman-Turkish, Hindi and Urdu: image making, picturing, representation – investigates contemporary ways and means of knowledge, which is oriented according to the aesthetic form of the classical tradition of commentary in Talmud and Islamic law.  The starting point of my work at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” is exhibition of which I was curator, “TASWIR – Islamische Bildwelten und Moderne”, which was displayed from October 2009 through January 2010 in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, the architectural form of which was based on the aesthetic principles of Hadith and Talmud commentaries, the two classical forms of legal transmission in the Jewish and Islamic tradition.

My research project at the Center comprises two areas.

1. Publication
2. Creation of a digital atlas TASWIR.ORG

1. My planned publication aims at releasing a German and an English-language picture and text publication on the TASWIR project. Both publications develop, albeit with a different emphasis, a commentated atlas of literary, visual, acoustic, and performative artifacts, related to Aby Warburg’s picture atlas, and in which a phenomenological and curatorial thought process orients itself along the non-linear figures of the Jewish and Islamic legal tradition. In both atlases, a simultaneity of diachronic references, a method of togetherness of the different, which is deeply rooted in, for instance, the argumentative figures of traditional Talmud finding of justice. The TASWIR project ties in to this Talmudian method of transmission, largely forgotten in Europe, and transforms it into a future institutional / architectural form of production of science and art within the public space.

Next to my two atlases on TASWIR, an English-language anthology on the materials of the exhibition is in planning, to which a series of renowned scholars, curators and artists from around the world will contribute.

2. The second component of my research project ist he creation of the planned digital atlas TAWIR.ORG

TASWIR.ORG is a future editorially arranged digital image and material atlas, which places visual, auditory, literary and other artifacts in context to one another in a theme-centric manner. TASWIR.ORG posits points of views of curators, artists, writers and scholars of all fields of knowledge in a phenomenological test arrangement of knowledge, which is currently being worked on by an international editorial team, and focuses on the simultaneity of the diachronic. TASWIR.ORG questions linear historiography, as is predominant in Europe, in favor of a variable order of knowledge.  By choosing the term TASWIR, the atlas confesses to working on the cultural subtexts of Europe, to the return of the suppressed, forgotten in Europe, vanquished, and covered up sources of Judeo-Arabic, Arabic, Persian, Jewish, and Turkish-Ottoman provenance. TASWIR.ORG develops an archive of a future ergography: a public work with objects; which re-orders the references between east and west, thereby offering a political alternative to the binary rhetoric of the “clash of civilizations” in a fundamental manner.

 

Publications (selected)

  • TASWIR. Islamische Bildwelten und Moderne, Berlin, 2010
  • Die Maske des Moses. Studien in der jüdischen Hermeneutik, Berlin, 2001 / 2007
  • Vom Aufstand der Bilder. Studien zu Rembrandt und Midrasch mit einer Skizze für eine zukünftige jüdisch-islamischen Werkstatt für Wissenschaft und Kunst, München, 2006
  • Ethics of Maimonides, Wisconsin, 2004
  • Claudio Lange, Der nackte Feind. Anti-Islam in der romanischen Kunst, Berlin, 2004
  • Numerous publications on Jewish philosophy. Long-standing teaching activity at the Department for Jewish Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1992-2001)