BEACONS
Islamic world’ s role in creating and transmitting games across Asia and beyond, drawing more than 100 objects on loan from institutions including the British Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Rijksmuseum. In 2025, a collaboration with the UAE Ministry of Culture, centered on the theme of nur, marked the 20th anniversary of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Museum’ s own tenth year. Earlier exhibitions followed the same instinct: Light: Visionary Perspectives brought together Canadian and international artists to consider what light means physically, spiritually, and metaphorically; The Moon: Journeys Through Time, timed to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, foregrounded the largely uncredited contributions of scientists from the Islamic world to space exploration.
Smaller,“ always-on” interventions run alongside the headline shows: a suspended atrium installation by Manal AlDowayan; an acquisition from Hayv Kahraman’ s How Iraqi Are You? series, now on long-term view; and Inner Structures— Outer Rhythms, a survey of contemporary Arab and Persian graphic design curated by the Beirut-born typographer Dr. Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès. Outdoors, the Aga Khan Park serves as a rotating gallery for photography, including a recent exhibition by the Moroccan-British artist Hassan Hajjaj.
For Al-Khamis, these international loans are as much about principle as about prestige.“ What made these collaborations successful was learning to be an equal partner rather than merely a recipient of loaned prestige,” she says of the Museum’ s ties to institutions such as the British Library, the Met, LACMA, and the Toronto Biennial— the last of which returned to the Museum’ s galleries in 2026.“ It’ s about sustained, reciprocal partnership rather than one-off showcases.”
The Beating Heart of the Museum
Al-Khamis is emphatic that performance and public programming receive the same institutional priority as the galleries— not as an add-on. The Duende International Flamenco Festival most clearly demonstrated that conviction: its 2026 edition paired flamenco with Qawwali in a performance at Massey Hall, described in the Museum’ s own framing not as a themed pairing but as“ a genuine cross-civilizational artistic fusion.” Similar instincts have shaped one-off collaborations over the years, including a 2019 improvised performance in which the Armenian-Syrian visual artist Kevork Mourad created a live artwork on stage while the Syrian-Canadian clarinetist Majd Sukkar played, with each responding to the other in real time.
The Museum’ s podcast, This Being Human, produced in partnership with The Walrus, is now well into its run of seasons, extending the same conversation beyond the building’ s walls. Free access points— Doors Open Toronto, family days, and community programming— round out a public-facing calendar designed, Al-Khamis says, to serve“ two audiences simultaneously: diaspora communities encountering their own traditions reframed and celebrated, and general Canadian audiences encountering them often for the first time— both experiences treated as equally central to the mission.”
Education is where that mission becomes most concrete. In 2024, the Museum launched a Schools in Residence program called Joy: The Art of Connection, in which students spend a full week engaging with the collection before creating and exhibiting their own artwork. Dr. Ulrike Al-Khamis recalls a label written by a young participant in the program’ s first season that has stayed with her:“ I am a mosaic of everyone I have ever loved.”“ There you have a student who suddenly realized what pluralism
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