is the fruit of cooperation between the Islamic World Education and Scientific organisation (ICESCO) and Orients Occidents Nexus (OON) to explore and highlight the encounters and transmissions of forms of arts and knowledge between Orient and Occident.
It aims to promote a joined system of creative activities, intellectual productions, research, documentation and/or information activities and/or exhibitions in the field of Art and Humanities. It endeavours to facilitate collaboration between artists, scholars, researchers, and professors, in Germany, Europe and other countries relevant to the Chair subject.
Description of the Chair
1.Nature of the Chair: Cultural/Artistic/ Scientific
2.Fields: Visual Arts / Humanities / History of Science
3.Overview of the Chair
3.1/ General Objectives of the Chair:
1- to promote studies of periods and places, when and where Orient and Occident met, enriching one another through arts and knowledge; their reciprocal perceptions, with focus on the Orient perception of those periods and places of encounter;
– This shall allow better recognizing, understanding and revaluing the contribution of each side to the culture of the other.
– By setting thorough studies of the Orient perception, the Chair installs an approach that allows the recollection of the image of the Occident in the Orient view, so that the Occident by recognising his own image in the Orient gaze may revise the image he has of the Orient.
– In a larger scale, it shall also contribute to a better understanding of actual times and contribute to the possibility of setting a common ground through a shared history, for a shared future.
2- to promote studies of forms and elements of arts that moved from Orient to Occident and from Occident to Orient;
Uncovering the origin of aesthetic forms, their transmission and implementation from one side to the other, enable an awareness of the full creative potential of those forms once embedded out of their place of origin; their extensive expressive power and their abilities to transcend.
3- to carry out studies that highlight the transmission of Knowledge between Orient and Occident;
– Studying the source and transfer-movements of knowledge from Orient to Occident and Occident to Orient, enable a better understanding of the forms of this knowledge, their development and their magnitudes and effects.
4- to promote and conduct artistic research on the Chair’s subject;
– Artistic research is a new emerging field of study, which is at crossroad between Art and Science; it is an endeavour in which the artistic and the academic are connected. As a discipline it stands for its own, as well as it enable artistic project to have a deep and surer footing along with a double perspective: scientific and artistic.
By encouraging it, we make science benefit from artistic approach as well as art benefits from scientific input.
5- to help make more visible the cultural exchange between Orient and Occident (for instance with publications, talks, exhibitions… etc.)
This 5th objective enable active access to the studies made in the frame work of the Chair for specialists as well as the large public; it also establish a closer connection between academics, intellectuals, artists and the society.
Head of the Chair: Siham Issami
Contact : ICESCO-OON-CHAIR@orients-occidents-nexus.com
Illustration: Seated Scribe, gouache and pen with ink on paper, by Gentile Bellini, 1479–80; in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. 18.2 × 14 cm.