The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of an Iranian Shrine

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Keelan Overton

The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin is simultaneously the burial place of a ninth-century saint (Yahya b. Ali), a destination for ziyarat (pious visitation), a neighborhood community center and cemetery, an architectural monument of Iran’s Ilkhanid period (1256–1353), a cultural heritage site that has experienced destruction 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. Directed by curator Keelan Overton since 2021, this grassroots and independent project hosted by Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online involves an international cast of contributors and is distinguished by its interdisciplinarity and accessibility.

Keelan Overton (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011) is an independent scholar and historian of art and architecture specializing in the Perso-Islamic world from Iran to India. Her publications explore the purveying of Iran’s cultural heritage, life histories of manuscripts and buildings, and cultural relations between Iran and the Deccan. The last culminated in her edited volume Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400–1700 (2020). Overton is the Director and Curator of The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of an Iranian Shrine, an independent production of her academic studio 33 Arches and hosted by Khamseen. Her publications on the Emamzadeh Yahya include “Jane Dieulafoy in Varamin: The Emamzadeh Yahya through a Nineteenth-Century Lens” (2024), “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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