6:00 PM: Persian Food and beverages ~ Tariff: $15.00 (if eating)
Contact Freddie Smith for Reservations / Cancellations at 312-842-7100 or Freddie@mcri.org by Noon THURSDAY, April 27, 2017

7:00 PM: Presentation
The Oriental Institute Museum exhibition "Persepolis: Images of an Empire" presents large-format photographs of the ruins of one of the greatest dynastic centers of antiquity, built at the height of the Achaemenid Persian empire (550–330 BC). The photographs, taken during the Oriental Institute's Persian Expedition (1931–1939), record the forests of columns, monumental audience halls, and stone relief carvings of the people who came from all corners of the empire to honor the Persian king. The show also explores the practice of photography itself and the nature of these photographs as both scientific records of an archaeological site and artistic visions of the ruins of a once powerful empire. This talk will explore the origins and continuation of this Achaemenid imperial visual legacy, with the dynastic center of Persepolis standing as a pinnacle of its success, as well as the role that photography, as a new apparatus of representation, played in constructing an image of the Orient and otherness in the 19th and early 20th century.

Bio Sketch: Dr. Kiersten Neumann, curator of this exhibit, is curator and research associate at The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, having received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Art and Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, in May 2014 with a dissertation on the Neo-Assyrian temple. She specializes in Mesopotamian visual culture and built environments, with a focus on sensory experience, ritualized practice, and cultural modes of viewing and representation, and the role of photography in early excavations in the Middle East.

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