Mariachiara Gasparini publishes dissertation on Central Asian textile art

The book “
Transcending Patterns: Silk Road Cultural and Artistic Interactions through Central Asian Textile Images” analyses the transcultural production and textile circulation at the heart of the Silk Road in a period spanning from the Islamic conquest to the rise of the Mongol Empire. Through a comparative analysis between the
Berlin Turfan-Collection (Museum of Asian Art, Berlin) and other textile fragments held in collections worldwide, Dr. Gasparini discloses and reconstructs the cultural entanglements occurred in a broad geographical area stretching from the Tarim to the Mediterranean Basin.

At the core of the study are the cultural encounters flourished in an area conventionally called “Sogdian-Turfanese”, which constituted an artistic matrix from which eastward and westward similar fabrics were woven, developed and transmitted across Asia and Europe. Exploring in detail the iconographic transfer between different agents and different media, such as sculpture, wall painting, and silk fragments, the author de-codes the peculiar “textile imagery” that developed across Eurasia between the seventh and fourteenth centuries. To this scope, the author also makes use of modern museological and fashion design-related techniques, such as microscopic photo-shots and digital reconstructions.

Incorporating various disciplinary expertises, from archaeology to digital image science, from anthropology to Asian languages, Gasparini´s study offers critical perspectives that extend far beyond a static, outmoded notion of “Silk Road studies.” Her work shows how material cultures are connected not only by physical routes, but also by the network of meanings and interpretations that the objects engage in various places. On this account, “Transcending Patterns” is a successful contribution to the developing field of Global Art History. The book is part of the series “
Perspectives on the Global Past,” published by the University of Hawaii Press.

Dr.
Mariachiara Gasparini was a doctoral student at the HCTS
Graduate Programme for Transcultural Studies (GPTS) between 2012 and 2015 (GPTS-4). Her dissertation was supervised by
Prof. Monica Juneja and
Prof. Sarah Fraser. Gasparini’s research focuses on Central Asian material culture, wall painting, artist’s praxis, and Sino-Iranian as well as Turko-Mongol interactions. Since 2015, she has been teaching Asian art in the San Francisco Bay Area.