This talk explores Isfahan through the lens of seventeenth century household anthologies (majmu’a). Thousands of manuscripts produced in Isfahan assembled urban objects ranging from portraits and letters from friends, to poems depicting the central square, to marriage contracts and talismans. Authors collected, curated, and bound together material generated by Isfahan’s culture of adab to learn how to act and relate to other residents of a diverse and ever-growing capital city. With these family collections, Professor Babayan tells a new history of Isfahan at the transformative moment it became a cosmopolitan center of imperial rule. Bringing into view people’s lives from a city with no extant state or civic archives, Kathryn Babayan reimagines the archive of anthologies to recover the dialogic relationship between the city and its residents.

National Museum of Asian Art
Tuesday, March 15 at 12 pm EST, please join us for “Fit for a Palace: The Craze for Safavid Carpets in Seventeenth-Century Europe” with Jessica Hallett.
In the fifteenth century, the city of Venice was the principal gateway for the arrival of highly valued knotted-pile carpets with geometric designs from the Ottoman Empire. When the Portuguese opened the sea route to India in 1498, Asian carpets became more accessible to consumers in Europe. In Iran, the Safavids decided to seize the opportunity and capture this new overseas market. A revolution occurred in Safavid production with the rise of an urban carpet industry that reacted swiftly, embarking on innovative changes to materials, colors, designs, and dimensions to compete with cheaper Turkish carpets. In Europe, a craze ensued as the elite looked to substitute their old-fashioned geometric carpets with new floral ones, turning the floors of their palaces into gardens. In this talk, Jessica Hallett, curator of the Middle East and China at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, will address how the synergy between makers in Iran and consumers in Europe created this “craze.”
Jessica Hallett was guest curator for Iraq and China: Ceramics, Trade and Innovation at the National Museum of Asian Art (2004). She has curated many exhibitions in Lisbon, since then, including The Oriental Carpet in Portugal at the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (2007) and The Rise of Islamic Art at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2019), both of which were awarded national prizes. Her publications include various academic articles and catalogues on ceramics, textiles, and carpets as well as the book Mamluk Glass in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (2000). She is currently preparing with Clara Serra a catalogue of Gulbenkian’s renowned carpet collection.
Register here: https://smithsonian.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_I6w65FMNQtqOrQgSnzy17Q
For more information please visit our events page: https://asia.si.edu/events or contact us: AsiaScholarlyProgram@si.edu

IMES Research Seminar Series
University of Edinburgh, Spring 2022
“De-centring (the study of) Shiʿism”

Note the rescheduling of the IMES research seminar of 21 February, which will offer two fascinating presentations by IMES PhD candidates Lucy Deacon and Carlos Mendez.

The new date for this seminar is Monday 28 March at 17:15. Those who had already registered for the talk should not need to register again. Here is the registration link, both just in case and also to review the full list of presentations https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYlcuyvqjgvHdaSodYsuXt5D9W4T3lim0DW

Lucy Deacon (UoE)
Karbala from Canvas to Stage: The Influence of Traditional Storytelling on the Iranian Taʿziyeh
Carlos Mendez (UoE)
Exploring the Intra-Shiʿi Moral Panic behind the Controversial Film “The Lady of Heaven”

The Psycho-Architectonics of the Imżā Inscriptions: Denotations and Connotations of Text in the Arts of the Safavids

The Courtauld, University of London
March 3, 2022, 18:00-19:30 (London)

By Dr. Mahroo Moosavi

By working between the two media of art and literature, this paper challenges some manners by which the textually infused arts of the early modern Iran have been conventionally perceived. While through the inherited discourse of Western art history, the inscription or epigraph is an appurtenance of the object’s visual and thematic language or is, on some occasions, reduced to a purely scientific and palaeographic element, this paper suggests an alternate discourse that extends the significance of such texts, especially the imżā [signature] inscriptions, beyond the normative, emphasising their particular agency as possible strategic ‘interventions’ envisioned and adopted by the artist, architect, or the patron.

Tracing its earlier roots in the increasing use and thematic specificities of text in the artistic productions of the Persianate societies from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onwards, this paper aims to open the current methodologies and understandings of the arts of the Safavids (1501-1722 AD) to a rereading. It does so by engaging with the ‘signature inscriptions’ as systematic architectonic design strategies that constantly de and re construct the object/space and the inter-woven micro politico-cultural context around it through activating the emotive-cognitive recipients of the user. By focusing on a number of cases such as the early seventeenth century mosque of Luṭfullāh in Isfahan and the mid-sixteenth century Sultan Ibrāhīm Mīrzā’s manuscript of Haft Awrang of Jāmī, this study shows how the application of text in the arts of early modern Iran operates as a mechanism through which the boundaries between different branches of art and knowledge may blur, making space for the reception and perception of art as an abstruse apparatus that functions through the layers of connotations of Persian psyche, language and literature.

Dr Mahroo Moosavi is Bahari Fellow in the Persian Arts of the Book at University of Oxford, Oliver Smithies Lecturer at Balliol College, University of Oxford, and Lecturer in architectural history, theory, and design at the University of Sydney. Her research is concerned with the intertext of art/architecture and poetry/prose, with a particular focus on the early modern Iran, through an interdisciplinary study of art/architectural history, literature, and post-structuralist philosophy. Her current project analyses the interpretations of form and structure of rhetorical devices in the chancellery writings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Iran to discern possible resonances within the artistic and urban system of the new city of Isfahan.

Please register at: https://courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/imza/

1. “Tekye-ye Dowlat” a documentary
Babak Rahimi is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Tekye-ye Dowlat
Time: Feb 15, 2022 12:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Meeting ID: 918 3376 2354

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2. “Photography of Moharram Rituals inside the Golestan Palace(1860s-1900s)”
Pedram Khosronejad (Powerhouse Museum, Sydney)
Time: Feb 17, 2022 02:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Meeting ID: 994 0483 8317

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+1 213 338 8477 US (Los Angeles)
Meeting ID: 994 0483 8317
Find your local number: https://ucsd.zoom.us/u/aRLInGyfT