Keelan Overton
The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin is simultaneously an architectural monument of Iran’s Ilkhanid period (1256–1353), a living sacred space and community cemetery, a cultural heritage site that has experienced destruction, renovation, and renewal, and an ‘object’ on display in over forty museums worldwide. This online exhibition offers an alternative museological space for exploring the shrine’s many looks, functions, resonances, users, and stories over the last seven hundred years. Developed by curator Keelan Overton since 2021, this grassroots and independent project involves an international team of a dozen collaborators and is part of a larger multi-year project devoted to the shrine. Khamseen agreed to host the exhibition and provided the project with funding from the University of Michigan’s History of Art Department to support its website design, bilingual presentation (English and Persian), and online production. The exhibition will be the first feature in Khamseen’s new Projects tab and is expected to launch in September 2024. Here is the coming soon page.
Keelan Overton (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011) is a historian of art and architecture specializing in the eastern Islamic world. Her publications explore the historiography of Islamic art, purveying of Iran’s cultural heritage, life histories of manuscripts and buildings, and cultural relations between Iran and the Deccan. She is editor of Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400–1700 (2020) and Director/Curator of The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of a Living Iranian Shrine. Her publications on the latter site include “Framing, Performing, Forgetting: The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin” (2022) and, with Kimia Maleki, “The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: A Present History of a Living Shrine, 2018–20” (2020).
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