Aga Khan Lecture Series: Margaret Graves "Fictions of Capital: Inventing, Extracting, and Fabricating Islamic Ceramics for a Global Market”

Margaret Graves: Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in honor of Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, Brown University

Historical ceramics from the Islamic world are now held in elite collections worldwide. Many migrated westward during the late 19th-/early 20^th-century heyday of Islamic art collecting, a time when craft skills in the Middle East were being redirected towards a new market generated by the colonial project’s fanatical harvesting of artefacts: the faking, forging, and fictionalizing of antiquities. This lecture re-encounters ceramics faking and forgery in the Middle East as a local form of highly skilled craft participation in modern global capitalism. The fictionalized objects of Islamic ceramics collecting married manual and cerebral ingenuity to create new objects of delight for elite collectors, in an environment where the structures of antiquities collection derive ultimately from colonial-era resource extraction and the instruments of international banking.