Modern Art and Islamic Craft in the Work of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Name: Modern Art and Islamic Craft in the Work of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian
Start: 2026-03-17T16:45:00-04:00
Location: Klarman Hall, Cornell University

Schedule

Tue, 17 Mar, 2026 at 04:45 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Klarman Hall, Cornell University | Ithaca, NY

Where: KG42 Klarman Hall
When: Tuesday, March 17, 4:45pm
Who: Hamed Yousefi, Klarman Post-Doctoral Associate
What: Lecture "Friendship and Control: Modern Art and Islamic Craft in the Work of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian"
In one of the most celebrated instances of modernizing Islamic craft, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019) transformed mirror revetment—a labor-intensive and opulent decorative technique popular in Iranian architecture since the early modern period—into post-minimalist sculptural reliefs and geometric constructions. She realized these works by employing artisans to execute her designs. Her relationship with these “assistants” can, therefore, be interpreted either as an exploitative form of wage labor, in which the artisan is reduced to a manual extension of the artist’s imagination, or as a mode of patronage that recuperates the value of traditional craft within the exceedingly respected domain of modern art. Through close engagement with artworks, the process of their making, and their modes of interaction with viewers, this talk argues that the conflict between freedom and subjugation, central to Eurocentric understandings of modern subjectivity and artistic expression, may be irrelevant to Monir’s practice. Instead, a more productive framework emerges from Islamic philosophy, specifically the concept of wilaya, which conjoins love and authority within a single relational act.