13th November 2023 by

Can Images Be Ekphrastic?

Wednesday December 6th 2-4pm, Arts Lecture Room 5.

Image: Lubaina Himid, A Fashionable Marriage, 1987, as restaged for the Turner Prize in 2017

The second seminar of Ekphrastic Encounters – the newly established interdisciplinary discussion/research forum on new forms and approaches to ekphrasis – will be led by Sophie Hatchwell, Associate Professor in Art History.

In the seminar, we will discuss the question ‘can images be ekphrastic?’ The discussion will take as a starting point Jas Elsner’s proposal that photographic images function ekphrastically within art historical writing. It will expand to consider whether other sorts of visual imagery, including that which references or attempts to represent, literary material, can be considered ekphrastic. We will use as a case study Lubaina Himid’s A Fashionable Marriage – restaged for the Turner Prize in 2017- which is based on the fourth image of William Hogarth’s painting and print series Marriage à la Mode, from 1743.

Below is some background reading for the seminar:

Jas Elsner, ‘Art History as Ekphrasis’Art History, 33:1 (2010), pp. 10-27.

Joy Kenseth, ‘Bernini’s Borghese Bronzes: Another View’, The Art Bulletin 63, no. 2 (1981), pp. 191-210.

If you would like to join the session online, then use this Zoom link:

https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/85765947877?pwd=L0FlODkzSUp1SW43Q3FnR3hVTUE1QT09