Qajar Women (AR)

Qajar Women highlights the diversity of women’s representations throughout Qajar artistic production and explores changes in the defining notions of female beauty in modern Islamic art.

Representations of women in the public and private sphere, female musicians, and aristocratic or symbolic women help to demonstrate their centrality in the artistic expression of 19th-century Iran.

Qajar Women offers the opportunity to showcase artworks of the Museum of Islamic Art’s permanent collection that have never been displayed in the past and to contextualise them with historical photographs from the Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran digital archive of the Harvard University Library, which demonstrate the artistic modernisation in Iran that appeared through both paintings and photography.

The objects range from albums featuring watercolour paintings to exquisite jewels evoking fascinating and rarely-told narratives of the Qajar artistic and social tradition.

Texts by: Dr. Mounia Chekhab-Abudaya, Dr. Nur Sobers-Khan, Amélie Couvrat-Desvergnes, Dr. Stefan Masarovic

Doha (Qatar), Museum of Islamic Art (MIA), April 2015 – June 2016