Weintz Art Lecture Series: Lamia Balafrej

Made possible by the J. Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz Art Lecture Series Fund, this series invites distinguished art historians from diverse concentrations each quarter to speak and engage with our students and the Stanford community, enriching the culture of art history and appreciation on campus and beyond. 

On Slave Clocks and the Potential of Figuration

The figurative binding of slavery and automation is rather well known for modern technology, including horology. Until recently, temporal accuracy was indeed achieved through a master/slave clock system that synchronized slave devices to a master clock. Lesser known, however, is the slave metaphor's impact on precapitalist machinery. In the medieval Islamicate world, clocks, as it happens, could include animated effigies of unfree workers like soldiers and servants, marking the passage of time through the regularity of their gestures. The process of figuring--contouring clocks in the shape of the enslaved--offers a means of connecting these timekeepers to the master/slave clock system. Yet, figuration did not simply anticipate or predict the rhetoric of the servile, auxiliary tool; as I argue in this talk, it likely had a more ambivalent effect, representing slaves as mediating agents.

Lamia Balafrej is Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, specializing in the Middle East and North Africa. Her current book project, Slavery in the Machine, explores historical intersections of technology, slavery, and figuration from the Mediterranean to Southwest Asia, using comparative, transhistorical, and visual approaches. The project has been supported by a Rome Prize (2022-23) and a Getty Scholar Grant (2023). Her interest in the relation of body and instrument grew out of her first book, The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), which examined Persian painting's visual intricacy in tandem with period notions of authorship, medium, and representation.

Image: Clock of the Slave Soldier. Folio from a copy of Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, al-Jami‘ bayn al-‘ilm wa al-‘amal al-nafi‘ fi sina‘at al-hiyal (A Compendium on the theory and practice of the mechanical arts), 1206, Anatolia. Istanbul, TSMK (Ahmet III 3473).

VISITOR INFORMATION: Oshman Hall is located within the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is available in designated areas and is free after 4pm on weekdays. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne Garcia at juggarci [at] stanford.edu (juggarci[at]stanford[dot]edu). This event is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Admission is free.

Connect with the Department of Art & Art History! Subscribe to our mailing list and follow us on Instagram and Facebook.