Every Piece You See is a Fragment: Persian Luster Tiles from Architectural

Join us for a conversation with Architectural historian Hossein Nakhaei, who invites audiences to a talk about Persian luster tiles. By reimagining them in their original architectural settings and examining them through the lens of fragmentation, we discuss how these tiles are interpreted outside their historical contexts.

About

The Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design, formerly the house of American collector and philanthropist Doris Duke (d. 1993), holds the largest collection of 13th and 14th-century Persian luster tiles in the United States. While these tiles are often admired as standalone artifacts with dazzling surfaces and technical brilliance, in their original settings they functioned as architectural elements that transformed royal, civic, and sacred spaces into multisensorial environments. Their removal in the 19th and 20th centuries not only disrupted these spatial qualities, but also fractured the connections between tiles, leaving many broken, displaced, or stripped of their original contexts.

Through this talk Nakhaei reconsiders Shangri La’s collection of luster tiles through the lens of fragmentation—both material and conceptual. It foregrounds the physical traces of breakage on individual tiles, while also suggesting that even seemingly complete ensembles, such as a mihrab or a cenotaph, can be understood as fragments when considered within the scale of the architectural spaces they once belonged to. By framing fragmentation in this dual sense, the talk exposes the layers of displacement and misrepresentation that have shaped the collecting and display of these tiles.

About the Speaker

Hossein Nakhaei is an author, architect, and architectural historian specializing in medieval Persian art and architecture, with a focus on displaced material culture. His research bridges technical art history, environmental humanities, and digital art history, combining an interdisciplinary approach with emerging technologies to reimagine how we understand decontextualized objects. His professional background in interior design also grounds his work in a spatial understanding of decontextualized objects and their environments.

Nakhaei is completing his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh as the 2025 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow. His dissertation, “Luminous Past, Fragmented Present: Persian Luster Tiles from Sacred Architecture to Museum Galleries,” interrogates narratives forged by Western art markets, museums, and scholarship, and adopts a reparative approach that re-situates luster tiles within the spatial, cultural, and ecological worlds in which they were made and experienced.

He is the author of The Great Mosque of Varamin: The Process of Formation and Evolution (2019), which received the 12th Farabi International Award in the Humanities and Islamic Studies, and was the lead contributor to The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of an Iranian Shrine, a digital project dedicated to one of the key historic sites once extensively adorned with luster tiles.