4:30 pm | FREE | Katherine W. and Ezekiel R. Dumke Jr. Auditorium

Beginning in the 1880s, the Ottoman painter, archaeologist, bureaucrat, and member of the modernizing elite Osman Hamdi undertook a series of paintings that depicted imposing, historical, and invariably fictitious mosque façades. In this talk Gülru Çakmak will examine the ways in which such images engaged both contemporaneity and the deep structures of history through an emphatically modern navigation of architecture, archaeology, photography, painting, and time.

This College of Fine Arts' Christensen Lecture series is hosted at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts featuring Gülru Çakmak, Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s (Liverpool University Press, 2017), and currently at work on a second book entitled Osman Hamdi and the Long Duration of History, examining the work of the Ottoman painter Osman Hamdi Bey as meta-paintings thematizing time and history.