Dr. Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts
Professor, UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures

“Haptic Visualities in Devotional Diasporas of Shirdi Sai Baba”

Visual images are integral to the transnational networks of a dynamic contemporary religious movement based upon the life and teachings of Shirdi Sai Baba, a South Asian saint who lived in the western Indian state of Maharashtra from the mid-1800s to 1918.  Shirdi Sai Baba defied religious nationalism, refused to self-identify as either Hindu or Muslim, and accepted the devotions of all castes and faiths, thus offering an alternative to communal ideologies. This presentation will explore how images actively shape devotion and impact this fast-growing movement’s expansion in communities of India, Mauritius, Germany, Ghana, and the US. In addition to documenting the history, production, and dispersal of images, it will focus upon the efficacy of the images through locally-defined understandings of indexicality that ensure the presence and proximity of the Saint despite diasporic dislocations and the digital reproduction of images. “Haptic visualities” and “corpothetics” will be discussed, as well as the role of new media and the blending with Eastern Orthodox icon traditions in the dissemination of Shirdi Sai Baba’s images around the world.

Miriam R. Levin
Professor of History and History of Art
Department of History, Case Western Reserve University

“City, Exposition, Museum in Modernity’s Perspective”

At the close of the nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization marked the end of the traditional understanding of society as rooted in agriculture. Paris was both the cultural capital of the 19th century and an international symbol of modernity.  This lecture will discuss the efforts of Paris-based urban elites under two different political regimes to construct an urban-centered, industrial-based culture—an entirely new social reality based on science and technology.  The synergy they created among expositions, urban rebuilding and museums provides the foundation for a new understanding of modernity’s history in which science and technology were constitutive.

Michelle Angela Ortíz
Visual Artist, Muralist, and Community Arts Educator

“Telling Their Stories: Engaging Communities through the Arts”

Michelle Angela Ortíz is a visual artist, skilled muralist, and community arts educator who has designed and created over thirty large-scale public murals in the United States and abroad. She uses her art as a vehicle to represent people and communities whose histories are often lost or co-opted. Through painting, printmaking, and public arts practices, she creates space for dialogue and action. Her work transforms “blighted” spaces into a visual affirmation that reveals the strength and spirit of the community.

For more information about Michelle Ortiz’s work, please see her website: www.michelleangela.com.

Made possible by the generous support of the Bryn Mawr College Center for Visual Culture, the departments of English, History of Art, Spanish, and Growth and Structure of Cities, the Dean of Graduate Studies, the Pensby Center, the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, the Center for Social Science, the Program in Latin American, Latino, and Iberian Peoples and Cultures, and the 1902  Lecture Fund.  Additional support provided by Enlace and the Intercultural Center, Swarthmore College.

David Cast
Professor, Department of History of Art
Bryn Mawr College

“Inside/Outside: Germany/London”

Shari Frilot
Senior Film and New Media Curator, Sundance Film Festival
2013 Tri-College Mellon Artist in Residence

“The Power of the Erotic: Curatorial Strategies at Sundance’s New Frontier”

Associate Professor, Department of History
Hofstra University
“The (Egyptian) Artist: Mohamed Bayoumi and Silent Cinema in Cairo”

Although not widely known, Mohamed Bayoumi was one of the great pioneers of Egyptian cinema. Born in 1894, Bayoumi left Egypt in 1920 to study filmmaking in Berlin. When he returned in 1923, he created his own newsreel and proceeded to shoot a series of short silent films. In this talk, I examine one of Bayoumi’s earliest films, Barsum yabhath ‘an wazifa/Barsum is Looking for a Job. Barsum represents Bayoumi’s first stand-alone directorial effort and deals with contentious social issues such as urban poverty and Coptic-Muslim relations in Cairo. I revisit this pioneering work and ask why Bayoumi championed the notion of film as an object of possibility, humor, and political significance.

Co-sponsored by the Program in Middle East Studies, Bryn Mawr College

Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
Bryn Mawr College

“Female Voice-Body Relationships and the Acoustic Organization of Tamil Cinema, 1940-1960”

This talk will explore how relationships between the female voice and the female body were managed in South Indian Tamil-language cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, during the transition from singing actresses to the division of labor between professional playback singers who recorded their voices in the studio and actresses who appeared on screen.  While the relationship between the female voice and the female body was managed through a combination of technological, discursive, and performative means in the world of South Indian classical music, it was simultaneously being negotiated in the context of cinema, where technological mediation provided expanded possibilities for representing voice-body relationships. Examining several Tamil films from this period, we can see a variety of ways in which the potentially problematic spectacle of a performing female body was presented.

Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of History of Art
Bryn Mawr College

“The Limits of Documentary: Identity and Urban Development in Agnes Varda’s Daguerreotypes (1975)”

French filmmaker Agnes Varda’s experimental documentary Daguerreotypes (1975) is often viewed as a quaint, cinematic portrait of a Parisian street, the rue Daguerre, where she lives and works.  In contrast, this presentation excavates the film’s previously unacknowledged sources, demonstrating how Varda drew on a range of visual media—photography, film, and contemporary art—to create sophisticated social and political commentary on urban and economic transformations taking place in France in the late 20th century.