Egypt & Austria X: Visualizing the Orient (Prague, Czech Republic, 2014) - Programme

The tenth Egypt and Austria conference took place in Prague from the 1st to 3rd October, 2014. It was organized by the Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) and the Faculty of Humanities (FHS UK) of the Charles University under the title: Visualizing the Orient. Central Europe and the Near East in the 19th and 20th Century.

The role of visualisation in the production of knowledge on Orient has become a subject of great interest in recent years. However, the question how the Oriental Other was represented in modern Central European visual culture has not yet stimulated an adequate scholarly interest. From the last decades of the 19th century onwards, the Orient became an integral part of a whole range of media and objects including photography, cinema, painting, and sculpture or book illustration. The Orient was staged, among others, in the most of Central European theatres and opera houses.

Last but not least, orientalist imaginations were incorporated into period pop culture objects, such as comic cartoons, advertising or fashion. Travels and travellers often played the role of actual or imaginary mediators The main goal of our conference is thus to discuss both the wide range of visual forms and the conceptual frameworks suitable for the analysis of their social impacts.

Amalia Sola Nizzoli (1805 - ?) and Miss Marianne Brocklehurst (1832–1912) were among those early female personalities that travelled through Egypt leaving a detailed account of their journey. Amalia’s Memorie sull’Egitto (1841) and Marianne’s Diary (1873) still constitute exceptional testimonies of Egypt’s customs as viewed by two European travellers of the Nineteenth Century. Furthermore, their remarkable experiences are not limited to the recollection of events: both Amalia’s and Marianne’s journeys have also contributed to the creation of two collections of Egyptian antiquities in Italy (Museo Civico Archeologico, Bologna) and England (Macclesfield Museum, Macclesfield).The paper analyses and compares their impressions, the type of accounts they left, and the important events they witnessed as well as their significant contributions to Egyptology.