A New Collaborative Research Project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation

Transcultural connectivity, long-distance entanglements and migrations of people, objects, materials, knowledge and ideas have been central research foci in the humanities in the past decades. The Material Migrations project will make a key contribution to these issues on micro-, meso- and macro-levels by focusing on metalwork from late 13th to early 16th-century Mamluk Syria and Egypt, that was carried to regions as far-flung as present-day Italy, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia and China, in some cases, shortly after it was made. The project will reconstruct the biographies of these objects. It will focus on them from the processes of their making and various uses within Mamluk society, as well as on their itineraries, transformations, roles, and the artistic responses they provoked in places across the world.

Material Migrations will bring together competences from diverse disciplines and institutional backgrounds from across the globe, organize academic events with invited scholars, and publish articles in peer-review journals and the first book-length study of Mamluk metalwork across Afro-Eurasia. The publications will focus on the migrations of Mamluk metal objects and artistic responses to them across the premodern globe in a variety of materials and media including both new research on site-specific contexts in the various locations as well as overarching analyses of transcultural connectivity. Material Migrations will challenge still prevalent Eurocentric perspectives in art history, that are often present even when pursuing a global approach to visual and material culture. It will contribute to current debates concerning conventional notions of 'center' and 'periphery', further helping to de-center Europe. And it will emphasize the significance of connectivity, transcultural interactions, and complex entanglements of long- and short-distance relationships in the premodern Afro-Eurasian world and the ‘lives’ of these objects across time and space including their role in local communities, museum and other contexts today.

Viewed as discursive objects, whose meanings have changed over space and time, Material Migrations will explore the movements of these objects and their integration into the societies that received them – which included the construction of new meanings and a variety of creative artistic responses. The project will shed new light on transcultural dynamics, networks, and processes of exchange. In doing so, it will challenge long-held art historical categories (i.e., sub-fields such as Islamic, European, African and Asian art histories, archaeology, and classifications into ‘high’ and ‘applied’ or ‘decorative arts’), as well as the biased perceptions of the world that emerge from the notion of 'center' and 'periphery'.