Organised by

Iran Heritage Foundation

Date

Wednesday 27th April 2016, 6.30pm

Location

Asia House, 63 New Cavendish Street, London W1G 7LP

Description

The British Museum has been acquiring works by Middle Eastern artists, principally works on paper, since the late 1980s. The formation of a Patrons' group in 2009 to support acquisitions dramatically increased the scope of this collection which now numbers over 600 works. This lecture will consider principally works in the collection by Iranian artists examining the nature of these works, the stories they tell and why they are important for the British Museum.

Biography

Venetia Porter has been a curator at the British Museum since 1989, and works on the collections of Islamic and contemporary Middle Eastern art. Born in Beirut, she studied Arabic and Islamic art at the University of Oxford, and her PhD from the University of Durham was on the history and architecture of medieval Yemen. Her research and publications have ranged across a variety of subjects from Arabic inscriptions to Middle Eastern art. She has curated two major exhibitions at the British Museum: Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East, in 2006 which travelled to Dubai in 2008 and Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam (2012).

---