Research Networks by Laura Hindelang
https://ocmelagroup.wixsite.com/ocmela
OCMELA (Oil Cultures of the Middle East and Latin America) is an interdisciplinary group that bri... more OCMELA (Oil Cultures of the Middle East and Latin America) is an interdisciplinary group that brings together area studies specialists among historians and art historians, cultural and literary studies specialists, and artists, bridging academic and artistic research.The group is a platform to put in conversation two key oil producing regions that have had a paramount influence in the making of the global worlds of oil, and in shaping economic and political relations between East and West, and North and South. OCMELA aims at de-centring petroleum’s Global North paradigm which has dominated the energy humanities and studies on petro-cultures and societies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Books by Laura Hindelang
Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2022
Die leuchtenden Blei- und Betonverglasungen des St. Galler Ateliers Stäubli gestalten als moderne... more Die leuchtenden Blei- und Betonverglasungen des St. Galler Ateliers Stäubli gestalten als moderne «Glaskunst am Bau» Restaurants, Wohnhäuser, Firmensitze, Garagen, Kirchen und Schulen in der Ostschweiz. Dabei entstehen facettenreiche Bezüge zwischen architekturgebundener Glasmalerei, Grafik, Tapisserie, Grabkunst und Wandmalerei, die das vielseitige Schaffen des Glasmalers Heinrich Stäubli (1926–2016) charakterisieren. Erstmalig werden Werk und Nachlass unter den Aspekten Glaskunst am Bau und Intermedialität kunsthistorisch gewürdigt. Die reich bebilderte Studie bietet eine systematische Einordnung des Ateliers Stäubli in die Geschichte der modernen Glasmalerei im deutschsprachigen Raum. Sie leistet einen wichtigen Beitrag zum Verständnis des Künstlerateliers und seiner Arbeitsweise und beleuchtet die künstlerische sowie gesellschaftliche Bedeutung von Glasmalerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts.
Vier mit Kartenmaterial ausgewiesene Spaziergänge zu «Stäubli-Schauplätzen» bieten zudem die Möglichkeit, sich selbst auf die Spuren der «Glaskunst am Bau» im Raum St. Gallen zu begeben.
Berlin/Boston, De Gruyter, 2022
Petro-modernity is a local phenomenon essential to the history of Kuwait, while also a global exp... more Petro-modernity is a local phenomenon essential to the history of Kuwait, while also a global experience and one of the prime sources of climate change. The book investigates petroleum’s role in the visual culture of Kuwait to understand the intersecting ideologies of modernization, political representation, and oil. The notion of iridescence, the ambiguous yet mesmerizing effect of a rainbowlike color play, serves as analytical-aesthetic concept to discuss petroleum’s ambiguous contribution to modernity: both promise of prosperity and destructive force of socio-cultural and ecological environments. Covering a broad spectrum of historical material from aerial and color photography, visual arts, postage stamps, and master plans to architecture and also contemporary art from the Gulf, it dismantles petro- modernity’s visual legacy.
Editorship by Laura Hindelang
https://brill.com/view/journals/mjcc/15/3/mjcc.15.issue-3.xml, 2022
edited by Laura Hindelang and Nadia Radwan, Manazir Blog, 18 October 2021, https://manazir.art/blog/nostalgia-and-belonging-art-and-architecture-mena-region, 2021
This collection brings together twelve short essays investigating how nostalgia and belonging com... more This collection brings together twelve short essays investigating how nostalgia and belonging come into play in the study of modern and contemporary art and architecture from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Each essay focuses on one selected object—a work of art or architecture—and reflects on its relation to the overall theme.
Find the whole project here: https://manazir.art/blog/nostalgia-and-belonging-art-and-architecture-mena-region/
Munich: edition metzel, 148 pages, 2018
Into the Wild is dedicated to the much-discussed research field of Art History in a Global Contex... more Into the Wild is dedicated to the much-discussed research field of Art History in a Global Context.
How can objects of art and architecture be viewed in a new or different way and which theoretical approaches can be useful in achieving this purpose? Which methods are suitable for discussing issues of transfer, mobility, migration and identity?
Fourteen essays address these and other questions by investigating various objects situated across different temporal and cultural contexts. Moving beyond antagonisms such as high and low or center and periphery, the essays focus instead on phenomena of translation, appropriation and site specificity.
Journal articles by Laura Hindelang
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 15.3, pp. 301--328, 2022
This article investigates the transregional cultural magazine Al-Arabi (al-‘Arabi) during the lat... more This article investigates the transregional cultural magazine Al-Arabi (al-‘Arabi) during the late 1950s and 1960s under its first editor, the Egyptian scientist Ahmad Zaki. Founded in Kuwait, the magazine’s establishment and sociocultural-political agenda are reconstructed within the context of Kuwait’s cultural diplomacy and pan-Arabism during decolonization and early Cold War politics. Al-Arabi offered timely discussions on Arab cities, gender, literature, politics and science, and readily embraced color photography for illustrations as a way of stimulating transnational understanding during times of substantial change in the region. Consequently, an analysis of Al-Arabi provides insights into historical strategies for re-imagining the region from within. Overall, the magazine can be situated in a long-standing tradition of Arab printing and publishing, while also forming part of a global illustrated magazine culture. Using a transdisciplinary approach, the article combines archival research and interviews with the media-historical and art-historical analyses of text, image and graphic design.
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 15.3., pp. 219--239, 2022
Research on urban spaces in the Gulf region has increased substantially over the last two decades... more Research on urban spaces in the Gulf region has increased substantially over the last two decades, particularly with a strong focus on contemporary phenomena. However, this focus often overlooks entangled histories and past trajectories that are formative for the present. Moreover, it perpetuates the notion of the region’s ahistoricity. To challenge the Gulf cities’ presumed lack of history, we have used a media-historical approach engaging with the history of a medium (e.g., architecture, film, magazine, photography, social media) in relation to a specific city. The article first provides an overview of recent research on the Gulf’s urban cultures in various disciplines. After introducing our approach, the article then considers temporality and spatiality as research perspectives in media studies and subsequently shifts to established media-historical approaches within Middle Eastern and South Asian area studies. It evaluates the complexities of writing on the art and architectural histories of the Gulf as specific forms of media. Finally, it addresses the potential of transdisciplinarity and collaboration as methods resituating the Gulf within the Arab region, the Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, respectively.
Centaurus, 63.4 (Special Issue: Making Power Visible), pp. 675–694, 2021
This article examines three cases of mid-20th-century oil media—oil-related imagery, iconographie... more This article examines three cases of mid-20th-century oil media—oil-related imagery, iconographies, and media—in visual culture: a series of popular science books entitled The Story of Oil published in the US, an oil-themed set of Kuwaiti postage stamps (1959), and an art exhibition in Zurich (1956) titled Welt des Erdöls: Junge Maler sehen eine Industrie (World of Petroleum: Young Artists See an Industry). While depicting crude oil in its natural habitat was a common photographic theme in the early 20th-century United States, the material discussed shows that, by the mid-20th century, crude oil no longer had the same visual presence. The iconography of oil in the three case studies came to rely increasingly on images of oil infrastructure and on context-specific depictions of living within petro-modernity or petro-culture, meaning lifestyles fueled by cheap fossil energy. However, it is not just the changes in visual representations of petroleum that matter; any debate about the visibility and invisibility of petroleum has to take into account the very media through which petroleum has become visually communicated—that is, the precise forms of oil's mediatization. The aesthetic negotiation of petroleum through media-based visual representations has been crucial for the dematerialization of fossil matter in its conversion to fossil energy, as well as the decoupling of sites of extraction from sites of production and consumption in the public imagination. As petro-culture has morphed into national or even global culture (rather than representing just one possible energy source among many), oil media has paved the way for our intimate relationship with fossil energy-dependent lifestyles, which is one of the biggest drivers of climate change.
bfo-journal, no. 5 (special issue), pp. 3--10, 2019
kritische berichte, 44.2, pp. 142--155, 2016
bfo-journal, 1, pp. 48--54, 2015
1955 wurde der italienische Architekt Gio Ponti beauftragt, einen Büro-komplex für das Iraqi Deve... more 1955 wurde der italienische Architekt Gio Ponti beauftragt, einen Büro-komplex für das Iraqi Development Board und das irakische Entwick-lungsministerium zu planen. Dieser wurde als einer der wenigen reprä-sentativen Bauprojekte für die Hauptstadt nach der Revolution von 1958 realisiert. In diesem Aufsatz wird ein Vergleich des Bagdaders Baus mit Pontis Pirelli-Hochhaus in Mailand angestellt und diskutiert, ob es sich um ein " Copy & Paste " bautypologischer und architekturtheoretischer Konzepte handelt.
Book chapters by Laura Hindelang
in: Nelida Fuccaro and Mandana Limbert (eds.), Life Worlds of Middle Eastern Oil. Histories and Ethnographies of Black Gold, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press 2023, 57–86.
The book chapter "Photographing Crude in the Desert: Sight and Sense among Oil Men" is dedicated ... more The book chapter "Photographing Crude in the Desert: Sight and Sense among Oil Men" is dedicated to the history of photography of the Arabian Peninsula in the context of geological oil expeditions in the early 20th century. The article analyzes archival and popular visual sources that have received little attention to date, tracing the relationship between sensory perception and photographic documentation of oil prospecting and later, oil urbanization.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
in: Nourane Ben Azzouna, Sabiha Göloglu and Markus Ritter (eds.), The History of Material Cultures and Visual Arts in Islamic Lands, (Beiträge zur islamischen Kunst und Archäologie, vol. 8), Wiesbaden: Reichert 2022, 209–222, 2022
This chapter invites the reader to re-think historical parallels of the ways in which Gulf cities... more This chapter invites the reader to re-think historical parallels of the ways in which Gulf cities have been read, described, and pictured. It does so by comparing the ways in which Kuwait (since the mid-20th C.) and Dubai (since the early 21st C.) have been discussed, described, and visually represented in influential English-language newspapers and magazines, particularly publications that reflect certain hegemonic attributions and Orientalist tropes that have shaped the perception of the Gulf. Given that architectural, infrastructural, and urban developments have always been crucial benchmarks, in my research I have identified four key aspects of the historical and contemporary “branding” of places in the region: (1) superlatives and world comparisons; (2) Orientalist tropes of Gulf spectacles; (3) planning with and for a view from above; and (4) the visual promotion of iconic architecture. Foregrounding this comparison is the understanding that the historical development of both cities has been shaped by the oil economy.
Amt für Denkmalpflege Thurgau (Hg.), Licht- und Farbenzauber – Glasmalerei im Thurgau, (Denkmalpflege im Thurgau, Bd. 23), Basel: Schwabe, S. 142–149, 2022
Mit Glasarbeiten in über 40 Bauten in den Kantonen St. Gallen, Zürich und Thurgau, spielt Stäubli... more Mit Glasarbeiten in über 40 Bauten in den Kantonen St. Gallen, Zürich und Thurgau, spielt Stäubli eine wichtige, von der kunsthistorischen Forschung bislang kaum beachtete Rolle für die Ostschweizer Kunstlandschaft. Dieser Beitrag bietet einen ersten Einblick in den Werkstattkosmos des Ateliers wie auch einen Überblick über Stäublis im Thurgau ausgeführten architekturgebundenen Glasmalereien.
Murtaza Vali with María Esperanza Rojo Jiménez, Mattin Biglari, Nelida Fuccaro, Laura Hindelang and Sanaz Sohrabi, in: Anne Szefer Karlsen and Helga Nyman (eds.), Experiences of Oil, Stavanger: Museumsforlaget, pp. 50–71, 2022
Our everyday familiarity with the automobile and the complex social, cultural, political, economi... more Our everyday familiarity with the automobile and the complex social, cultural, political, economic and infrastructural systems necessary for its usemake it a useful and accessible lens through which to track and trace the otherwise slippery narratives and textures of petromodernityIn this preliminary attempt to map out parallels and distinctions between the experiences of automobility and petromodernity in these two regions, the OCMELA members share snippets from their ongoing excavations of oil’s vast corporate archive, a treasure trove of print and visual culture, from the once-private papers and photographs of those who worked foroil companies to the many richly-illustrated magazines and industrial films these companies produced and distributed to promote their activities and products.
in: Carola Hein (ed.), Oil Spaces: Exploring the Global Petroleumscape, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 159–175, 2021
In early 1962, Kuwait's first substantial subterranean water reservoir was discovered at Raudhata... more In early 1962, Kuwait's first substantial subterranean water reservoir was discovered at Raudhatain in northern Kuwait. 1 The Ralph M. Parsons company, which was conducting hydrogeological surveys on behalf of the government of Kuwait, was a US firm formerly active in building oil refineries. Geologists described how "the fresh water [had] gathered in a geological basin one side of which is an anticline of the structure forming the Raudhatain oilfield ." 2 Raudhatain's water (most of it fossil) and petroleum effectively sprang from the same geological formation and were accessed by similar technologies. This multifaceted historical relationship between Kuwait's water(scape) and petroleumscape, with its spatial and architectural, social, and political as well as symbolic and representational layers, is the topic of this chapter. One can trace petroleum's impact on twentieth-century Kuwait in many ways: airplane and automobile culture, gas stations, airconditioning , and the proliferation of plastics-all depend on petroleum. In Kuwait, the oil industry but also the oil revenue-financed government transformed the city-state's urban and desert landscapes, its architectural forms, and the built environment. However, despite the growing omnipresence of petroleum-derived products and lifestyles, petroleum as a raw material, as an unprocessed liquid, has usually remained invisible in urban space. Chemically, oil and water do not mix, but in Kuwait, as the brief example of Raudhatain illustrates, the history of oil and the history of water flow together. Yet, the visual-spatial absence of oil has obscured the two fluids' interdependent conditions of existence. Water has been given a direct material and spatial presence in a way that oil has not, whereby potable water, whose production, transport, and distribution has relied substantially on petroleum and the petroleumscape in one way or another, became the representative liquid of Kuwait's oil-based modernization. Water has been celebrated with direct contact in ways petroleum was not because of oil's physical characteristics (toxic, inflammable, smelly). At the official inauguration of the opening of the Raudhatain water reservoirs, Kuwait's deputy prime minister drank from the powerful stream of clear water shooting down from a massive pipe connected
with Antonie Bassing, Charlotte Matter and Filine Wagner (eds.), in: Into the Wild. Art and Architecture in a Global Context, Munich: edition metzel, pp. 6–16, 2018
in: Into the Wild. Art and Architecture in a Global Context, Munich: edition Metzel, pp. 63--72, 2018
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Research Networks by Laura Hindelang
Books by Laura Hindelang
Vier mit Kartenmaterial ausgewiesene Spaziergänge zu «Stäubli-Schauplätzen» bieten zudem die Möglichkeit, sich selbst auf die Spuren der «Glaskunst am Bau» im Raum St. Gallen zu begeben.
Editorship by Laura Hindelang
Find the whole project here: https://manazir.art/blog/nostalgia-and-belonging-art-and-architecture-mena-region/
How can objects of art and architecture be viewed in a new or different way and which theoretical approaches can be useful in achieving this purpose? Which methods are suitable for discussing issues of transfer, mobility, migration and identity?
Fourteen essays address these and other questions by investigating various objects situated across different temporal and cultural contexts. Moving beyond antagonisms such as high and low or center and periphery, the essays focus instead on phenomena of translation, appropriation and site specificity.
Journal articles by Laura Hindelang
Book chapters by Laura Hindelang
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Vier mit Kartenmaterial ausgewiesene Spaziergänge zu «Stäubli-Schauplätzen» bieten zudem die Möglichkeit, sich selbst auf die Spuren der «Glaskunst am Bau» im Raum St. Gallen zu begeben.
Find the whole project here: https://manazir.art/blog/nostalgia-and-belonging-art-and-architecture-mena-region/
How can objects of art and architecture be viewed in a new or different way and which theoretical approaches can be useful in achieving this purpose? Which methods are suitable for discussing issues of transfer, mobility, migration and identity?
Fourteen essays address these and other questions by investigating various objects situated across different temporal and cultural contexts. Moving beyond antagonisms such as high and low or center and periphery, the essays focus instead on phenomena of translation, appropriation and site specificity.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
environment from past to present. This is specifically significant in increasingly
urbanized societies. It is further linked to the eternal question: under which
conditions would we like to live? With its longevity over time, architecture serves
as an outstanding material archive. To decipher and contextualize architecture
– also in campaigning for its preservation – creates complex insights, even for
the burning questions of our present time. Tackling these challenges is an interdisciplinary
endeavor, where among other disciplines, Building Archaeology,
Monument Preservation, Archaeology, History Politics, and Literature collaborate.
Architecture has always been the product of negotiation and collaboration.
Normative principles, claiming universality, were superseded by radical changes
oftentimes reclaiming a new norm. At the same time, although architecture is
something generally static, it has always been affected by the mobility and flexibility
of clients, architects, and users. Thus, it became a focal point of social
interests, mirroring the respective social, material and political conditions.
This conference focuses on the negotiation processes around architecture, its
intercultural dimensions, criticism of the canon and its diversification. It aims to
critically contribute to Architectural History as a relevant contemporary practice.
https://vitrocentre.ch/en/art-history/conferences/international-conference.html
"Mit wachsenden Einnahmen aus der Erdölindustrie strebte das britische Protektorat Kuwait Mitte des 20. Jh. nach rascher und umfassender Modernisierung. Kuwaitische wie auch britische Interessen fokussierten besonders auf die stadträumliche Entwicklung der Küstenstadt. Minoprio, Spencely und Macfarlane, junge britische Stadtplaner, entwarfen 1951 einen Masterplan für Kuwait City auf Basis modernster britischer Stadtplanungstheorie. Dessen Implementierung leitete eine grossflächige Transformation der baulichen und soziokulturellen Stadtstruktur ein und stimulierte internationale Aufmerksamkeit für die modernisierende Golfregion.
Doch bereits in den 1960er Jahren wurden kritische Stimmen, wie die des in Kuwait tätigen Stadtplaners Saba Georg Shiber, laut, der radikale Umbau orientiere sich nur an westlichen Modellen, wobei der spezifische Charakter der Stadt verloren ginge. Daraufhin verstärkten sich Debatten sowohl über den Umgang mit lokalen und arabisch-islamischen Vorbildern, als auch über funktionale und klimatische Anforderungen. Zudem prägten profitorientierte internationale Bauunternehmen zunehmend das städtische Image der Region, indem sie unterschiedlichste Verkaufsstrategien anwandten, um lukrative Projekte zu realisieren.
Im Kontext lokaler, arabischer und westlicher Debatten um identitäre bzw. ortsspezifische Architektur stellt die städtebauliche Transformation Kuwaits somit ein herausragendes Beispiel für postkoloniale Identitätsprozesse dar. Indem der Fokus auf das in diesem Kontext zirkulierende Bildmaterial (u.a. Kartenmaterial, Masterpläne, Luftaufnahmen, Stadt- und Architekturfotografie) gelegt wird, sollen aus medientechnologischer, machttheoretischer und rezeptionsästhetischer Perspektive u.a. folgende Fragen gestellt werden: Welche Fremd- und Eigenwahrnehmungen des jungen Golfstaats entwickelten unterschiedliche Akteure mit unterschiedlichen Absichten? Wie wurde diese transformierende Stadt in Text und Bild repräsentiert und welche Identitätskonzepte wurden entwickelt?"