Persica Centropa:

Cosmopolitan Artefacts and Artifices in the Age of Crises,

1900-1950 

FWF Elise Richter Programme (V-995)

Project Leader: Dr. Yuka Kadoi

PERSICA CENTROPA seeks to redefine what used to be called ‘Persian art’—cultural artefacts that became predominantly associated with medieval and early-modern Iran and West Central Asia—while reframing it as an alternative narrative of aesthetic thinking that evolved in Central Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Spanning from the declining years of the Habsburg empire to the emergence of new nation states within its former territories after 1918 and the devastation of World War II, this four-year project maps out the network of collecting and interpreting Persian objects and images against a backdrop of the socio-political upheaval of a once-thriving cosmopolitan cultural region.