080099 SE Where is God? Visualising Religious Themes in the Mosque (2024S)

The seminar discusses how religious themes are visualized in the architecture of medieval and early modern mosques, that is, content and semantics of art in the mosque. It thus poses a question that has been raised less frequently in recent times. In the research of past decades, visual phenomena in mosque building, beyond the history of forms, have primarily been considered from historical-political, socio-economic and functional perspectives. Above all, the interpretative perspective of architecture as representation, as a medium that refers to the patron and his/her position and power, has been in the foreground. These perspectives are all justified, but result in an intellectual secularization of the mosque. To be sure, the categorization 'profane' and 'sacred' applies to mosques only to a limited extent: the mosque is first and foremost a meeting place for the prayer ritual in community, not a 'sacred' place. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that the mosque is primarily a place of religious practices and that the formal and artistic design of the mosque can, and must, be viewed from this perspective.

The seminar pursues the visualization of religious themes in elements, motifs and their visual design in mosque construction, such as: the spatial structure with dome or accentuated nave; the minaret tower; the mihrab (the prayer niche); the pictorial and decorative furnishings; the placement, form and content of inscriptions; the minbar (the pulpit). Here it is less about the element itself, which serves as a framework for the question, but more about the artistic design and its communicative content. The question discusses an iconicity of such design and is methodologically situated in the realms of iconography. The seminar does not seek a history of development, but rather discusses topics in a thematic structure using concrete examples from different regions and times.