The Making Of: Blue with Azar Emami Pari

In the next edition of the event series “The Making Of,” Azar Emami Pari will present her research on indigo and its material and visual mobilities between Ottoman and Italian contexts. She will follow indigo from plant to pigment and from vat to textile, asking how material processes, embodied labor, and artisanal knowledge shaped the ways blue was produced, seen, and understood. Alongside the presentation, participants will engage in a practical indigo-dyeing session. At the vat, color becomes a matter of material attention and time.

The presentation (3:00 pm) develops from Azar Emami Pari’s research “Indigo’s Journey: The Material and Visual Mobilities of Dye in Ottoman and Italian Art after 1800,” which traces indigo between Ottoman and Italian contexts while situating these movements within wider Mediterranean, commercial, and colonial networks. Rather than treating these contexts as two opposing visual systems, the project examines the infrastructures through which indigo circulated, the forms of embodied and artisanal knowledge through which it was produced, and the changing systems through which color was classified and standardized. It concludes with the emergence of synthetic indigo toward the end of the nineteenth century and the transformation this brought to the production and understanding of color. 

The workshop will take place at Via Modena 13, where we will meet at the entrance at 2:30 pm. Please register for the workshop in advance via coded.objects@khi.fi.it. Spots will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

The presentation can be attended separately from the workshop without registration and will take place from 3:00 to 4:00 pm.

The event series “The Making Of,” organized by the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects,” asks guests to invite us behind the scenes of the process of making: of artworks, of texts, of films, or of objects. How did they come into being? What were the constraints, limitations or adversities and, conversely, the opportunities and decisions that shaped both the process and the (potential) outcome? Rather than an artist’s talk or a scholarly lecture, this series seeks to discuss the processes of making firsthand. Alongside the talks, the series incorporates practical workshops and the actual making of things. The dictum of the material, the humbling lack of skills, the discovery of form-finding: these are all modes of knowledge that reside in the shaping of matter.

Biographical Note

Azar Emami Pari is a doctoral candidate in art history at Technische Universität Berlin and a pre-doctoral fellow in the Lise Meitner Research Group “Coded Objects” at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. She teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Passau. Her doctoral research traces Safavid carpets through histories of collecting and display.