Al-Mounamnamāt Collection

The Al-Mounamnamāt Collection: before Europe pressed faces into lockets, the art of the small portrait lived in the courts and libraries of Persia, Mughal Hindustan, Ottoman Istanbul, and the silk-lit ateliers of Samarkand and Bukhara.

With the collapse of Muslim empires, the rush of photography, and the dissolution of manuscript culture, this intimate art retreated into a whisper of the past, guarded now by only a few surviving masters in Jaipur, Tabriz, Isfahan, Lahore and Bukhara. With a near monastic dedication to the craft taking weeks, sometimes months, working under magnification with single-hair brushes, Al-Mounamnamāt are among the most demanding and delicate arts known to the so-called Orient, requiring a scale of devotion the modern world rarely remembers.

Each piece curated by Chouqduff honors this miniature inheritance, where devotion meets detail and likeness becomes talisman. From the lovers of Andalus and Persia to scholars, saints, and poetesses, each portrait is a dialogue between spirit and story, taking months to coax a face, a soul or a story from within the inner dialogues of the rare remaining craftsman to pigments on silk.