Almut Shulamit Bruckstein Çoruh held various professorships in Philosophy, Jewish Studies, Visual Theory, Taswir Studies in Jerusalem, Berlin, Lucerne, Frankfurt, Hamburg, et al., Rudolf Arnheim Professor at Humboldt University Berlin (2003), Martin Buber Professor at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt (2004-2006), Forum Humanum Professor at University of Hamburg (2012); curator of the TASWIR Exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin (2009-2010); co-director of “Jewish and Islamic Hermeneutics as Cultural Critique” at Institute for Advanced Studies Berlin (2002-2005); Fellow at Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Law as Culture” (2010-2011); director of Taswir Projects / ha’atelier (since 2001); creates the Taswir Atlas; numerous publications in Jewish Philosophy, Visual Theory, and Taswir Studies. Forthcoming: The Taswir Project: Doing and Undoing Things. Emerging Epistemic Architecture(s), München: W. Fink, 2013.  

Research Project

The Taswir Atlas: Interweaving Objects

During the three months of my fellowship I will further flesh out the matrix of attributes that governs the Taswir Atlas, an instrument for the interweaving of objects on a flat surface. The atlas turns an absent object - the Taswir exhibition in Berlin 2009 - into a research agenda / imaginary institute that works with a loosely associated faculty in between digital and analog environments, performing classical objects in contemporary contexts, drawing on Freud’s dream theory, Talmudic intertexts, and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Project.

The algorithmic order underlying the matrix of attributes that governs the Taswir atlas is modeled after 10th to 13th-century Arabic and Judeo-Arabic theories of “relative attributes.” “Relative attributes” in medieval epistemologies advocate the indeterminacy and relativity of human knowledge concerning the divine subject. Arabic and Judeo-Arabic classical scholasticism negates any essential attributes with respect to the divine. What the Taswir Atlas does is substitute material objects for the divine subject, ‘bending’ the divine attribute towards the materiality of the object. What emanates from this act of bending is a subjective objectivity, a psycho-cartography of moving artifacts taken out of context, veiled, displaced, out-of-line.

Recommended Publications

• Toufic, Jalal, Vom Rückzug der Tradition nach einem unermesslichen Desa, A. S. Bruckstein Çoruh (ed.), Christoph Nöthlings (tr.), Berlin: August Verlag, 2011.

• Vom Aufstand der Bilder. Materialien zu Rembrandt und Midrasch, München: W. Fink, 2007.

• Taswir Projects: Missing Contemporary Art, IBRAAZ platform # 4, see: http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/43. 

• House of TASWIR. Doing and Undoing Things. Notes on Epistemic Architecture(s), Munich: W. Fink, forthcoming December 2013.