Global Lab: Art as a Message, Asia and Europe 1500-1700

Ever since Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism was published in 1979, the epoch between 1500 and 1700 has increasingly been understood as the moment when the economic and colonial forces that govern our world today fell into place. It was in this era that Europe's relationship with Asia first blossomed, and that cultural artifacts began to flow back and forth, each influencing the other. Global Lab compares outstanding artworks and artefacts from various countries, contextualizing them as catalysts of cultural communication. A woodcut by Dürer, illustrated Chinese scrolls, illustrations from the Khevenhüller Chronicle, Turkish fayence, 60 miniatures from the Hamzanama, a sixteenth-century handwritten Mogul document: these are just a few of the varieties of nomadic document that Global Lab juxtaposes. It also features essays by outstanding Orientalists, art historians, and authors such as Salman Rushdie, Barbara Frischmuth and Wheeler M. Thackston, who reinterpret central questions about cultural exchange between Asia and Europe, attempting a perspective that obviates Eurocentrism while giving us a taste of the thrill and novelty that must have attended the exchanges of such delectable objects.