ISLAMABAD: A presentation to introduce the world famous Aga Khan Museum in Toronto was held on Saturday.

The museum is the first of its kind of North America, dedicated to the arts of Islamic civilisations, and an audience of some 300 art enthusiasts attended the event.

The presentation was delivered by Henry S. Kim, the director and CEO of the museum – an initiative of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture - at the Serena Hotel.

Aziz Boolani, the CEO of Serena Hotels, said: “The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto [has] given a space to Pakistani artists. Pakistan art and artists have regularly found space at the museum, beginning with one of the earliest temporary exhibitions, The Garden of Ideas: Contemporary Art from Pakistan, which featured the work of six internationally acclaimed Pakistan artists: Bani Abidi, Nurjahan Akhlaq, David Chalmers Alesworth, Aisha Khalid, Atif Khan, and Imran Qureshi.

“I have also discussed with Henry the possibilities of taking more Pakistani artists to the museum to provide them access to an international audience.”

Mr Kim who joined the museum in 2012 around two years before the opening, gave a brief presentation on its vision.

The museum has had a very strong interest in Pakistan since its beginning. He said the museum existed because His Highness, the Aga Khan, wanted people to learn about the history of the peoples and cultures that comprise the 35 or more Muslim countries around the world.

He said: “Our education systems do not encourage us to understand diversity. You look at popular media and there is very little understanding of different cultures.

“Pakistan is one of the most remarkable countries in the world – it is also one of the most diverse countries in the world – one where 30 or 40 different languages or dialects are spoken, with many ethnicities, one of the earliest civilisations known, the birthplace of Buddha.”

The museum’s permanent collection of close to 1,000 objects includes masterpieces that reflect a broad range of artistic styles and materials, of which more than 200 are on display at a time in the ground floor gallery spaces.

The portraits, textiles, miniatures, manuscripts, ceramics, tiles, medical texts, books and musical instruments represent more than 10 centuries of human history and a geographic area stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to China.

Its collection is also complemented by programmes in performing arts and education and a continuous calendar of temporary exhibitions which are changed roughly every quarter.

The Aga Khan Museum is a gateway into the history and artistic traditions of the Muslim world — nearly a fifth of humanity — and for those non-Muslims and even Muslims who wish better to understand that world. Mr Kim explained that the vision was essentially to create a cultural campus. His Highness the Aga Khan had intended that the museum would be a place for active inquiry and therefore provide numerous opportunities and forms of programmes for learning.

Narrating the process in which the museum was commissioned, Mr Kim said His Highness wrote a five page letter to the architect Fumihiko Maki explaining his vision for the museum, in which he focused on the principle of light both in the sense of illumination but also enlightenment.

The gallery spaces were designed around light wells and lanterns so light filters in. At the same time, traditional geometrical patterns and Islamic motifs were incorporated into the Japanese minimalism.

Satrang Gallery’s Asma Rashid Khan started the question and answer session by asking why the museum was located in Toronto. Mr Kim explained that the museum was centred in the developed world because that is where you have a chance to influence policymakers and donors to further the mission.

He added: “Canada is one of the most successful multicultural countries in the world and 80pc of the visitors to the museum were non-Muslims who were keen to learn about Islamic art and culture.”

Discussing future plans, he said the museum was planning to purchase a yellow school bus and to decorate it with truck art because art includes popular art, and truck art is a wonderful form of popular art that one experiences in Pakistan.

Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2017