Ittai Weinryb is an associate professor at the Bard Graduate Center. He is currently completing a book on art and material culture circulating in the Black Sea region during the Middle Ages and early modern period and another monograph which centers on the sentiment of Hope as a category of artistic creativity. He is the co-editor of the book series Art/Work which is set to narrate a new history of art founded in the study of objects, materials, and technology. He is the author of The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages (2016) and of Die Hildesheimer Avantgarde: Kunst und Kolonialismus im mittelalterlichen Deutschland (2023), and the curator of the exhibition Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place (2018).
The lecture will be held from 6.30 pm - 8.30 pm on January 16th 2025, at Forum des Austauschs (OASE) at the HHU. It is set to explore the rise of mercantilism in proto-capitalist Europe as a way for us to reconsider medieval and early modern aesthetic thinking. Examples from the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea, will help uncover how newly discovered fetishistic notions regarding image and thing, helped generate new aesthetic categories based on perception not grounded in philosophical or theological scholasticism.