Join the John Hay Library and the Center for Middle East Studies for a talk by Dr. Moya Carey, Curator of Islamic Collections at the Chester Beatty in Dublin, Ireland. Dr. Carey will discuss the making of the exhibit “Meeting in Isfahan: Vision and Exchange in Safavid Iran.”
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
4 p.m.
Primary Sources Lab (room 321)
John Hay Library
Free and open to the public.
Meeting in Isfahan: Vision and Exchange in Safavid Iran
In February 2022, as Covid restrictions finally began to ease in Ireland, a new exhibition opened at the Chester Beatty in Dublin: “Meeting in Isfahan: Vision and Exchange in Safavid Iran.” Told through manuscripts, album pages, and printed books, “Meeting in Isfahan” explored how the historic city of Isfahan became a new hub for dazzling urbanity, dynastic self-projection, and cosmopolitan energy, thanks to a strategic centralization of the silk economy.
Together with loans from the National Museum of Ireland, the exhibition presented 65 exceptional works from the Chester Beatty’s Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and Armenian collections, as well as early printed books and maps from Europe.
Moya Carey
Dr. Moya Carey is the Curator of Islamic Collections at the Chester Beatty in Dublin. Previously, she worked as the Iran Heritage Foundation Curator for the Iranian Collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She is interested in visual culture in all media, most particularly the arts of the book, carpets and metalwork, the history of science illustration, and the cultural contexts surrounding later appropriations, re-use, collecting history, and provenance.
In 2022, Dr. Carey curated the exhibition “Meeting in Isfahan: Vision and Exchange in Safavid Iran” (4 February – 28 August 2022) at the Chester Beatty. Her research also addresses the art and architecture of Qajar Iran, and the history of collecting in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in relation to Egypt, Syria and Iran. She is working in partnership with Prof. Mercedes Volait on a research project centered on architectural salvage, repurposed for private collections and national display contexts alike, in late 19th-century Cairo.