Images of Egypt

Abstract

Since Napoleon invaded Egypt with an army of soldiers and scholars in 1798, images of Egyptian landscapes and monuments have circulated as fantasy and reality in the West. Soon after the Western encounter with Egypt, physical parts of the same landscape were brought to London, Paris, Turin, Berlin, and New York. Scientific exploration, artistic imagination, colonial geopolitics and daunting engineering invented and fragmented Egypt for modern sensibilities. Images of Egypt presents an ancient landscape in radical transformation across media, including supersized engravings, panoramas, porcelain, opera designs, paintings, photography and postcards, furniture and fashion, filmsets, exhibitions and facsimiles. With contributions by world-leading architectural historians and students from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. ---- Exhibition: Kulturhistorisk museum, Oslo, Norway (20.09.-20.12.2018).

Contents

Part I: Moving Egypt / Tim Anstey and Mari Lending.--Making a monument : the tomb of Seti I and its afterlives / Eirik Arf Gulseth Bøhn.--Nasser moving Ramesses / Beata Labuhn.--Part II: The unlawful image of an obelisk / Victor Plahte Tschudi.--Pompey's Pillar / Adrian Forty.--Portable antiquity / Caroline van Eck.--From sepulchre to saloon / Olivia Horsfall Turner.--The alabaster columns from the pontifical expedition to Egypt 1840-1841 / Richard Wittman.--Egypt in fashion / Maude Bass-Krueger.--Empire uprooted / Craig Buckley.--Operation Egypt / Lucia Allais.--Egypt in Leytonstone / Even Smith Wegeland.--Putting King Tut to work / Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen.--Preservation, facsimiles and re-uniting fragments / Adam Lowe.--Part III: Schinkel and the magic flute / Kosha Ahmadi.--Panorama / Martin Tosterud.--Shipping the Luxor Obelisk to Paris / Xianwen Zheng.--Museum fragments / Ingemar Eirik Nesheim.--Postcards / Mikala Kjaer.--Tutmania : geopolitics and the museum shop / Robert Somod.--Unearthing Cecil B. DeMille's Californian Egypt / Eirik Stokke.