منارات means,” she says. Each winter, the Museum’ s long-running partnership with OCAD University brings animation students to respond to the collection with new work, projected onto the building’ s facade after dark in a program called Light Up the Dark— a fittingly literal answer to a museum built around the idea of light.
Cultural Diplomacy in Practice
Among the achievements Al-Khamis cites as her proudest is a 2024 memorandum of understanding with the UAE Ministry of Culture, which brought three young Emirati practitioners to Toronto to study not conventional, Western-centric museology, but what it means to collect and build a museum from an indigenous, local perspective. The resulting project, centered on the contested and still-evolving category of“ contemporary Islamic art,” combined photography, illumination, and poetry. It was first shown in Abu Dhabi before being substantially rethought for a Toronto audience.“ The project, as a process and as a commitment to learning together— eye to eye, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder— was one of the most rewarding experiences I’ ve had,” she says. helm, Al-Khamis doesn’ t reach for a project list.“ Our work is never finished— and it’ s becoming more urgent,” she says, citing climate change, social cohesion, and the pressures of an AIdriven age as reasons the Museum’ s founding mandate has grown more relevant since 2014.“ For me, work in a museum has always been social work.”
Ten years after opening, the Aga Khan Museum has become more of a living campus than a single-purpose building: a connector between Muslim civilizations and the wider world, and between generations within diaspora communities. Its galleries, stage, podcast, and park all point toward the same unfinished project of reshaping how Muslim cultures are seen, experienced, and understood in North America— one visitor, one performance, and one school group at a time.
With thanks to Dr. Ulrike Al-Khamis, Director and CEO of the Aga Khan Museum, 2017 – 2026, for her time and reflections.
Institutional partnerships with the Government of Canada, RBC, and the Nanji Family Foundation, among others, complement that cultural diplomacy and further demonstrate trust across sectors— evidence, in Al-Khamis’ s framing, that the Museum’ s soft power rests on reciprocity rather than on one-off visibility.
An Unfinished Definition
Pressed on how she defines Islamic art— a term she calls“ highly problematic”— Al-Khamis doesn’ t hedge.“ It is ultimately the invention of Western-centric scholars, connoisseurs, and educators,” she says.“ Much of what’ s defined as Islamic art was never used exclusively by Muslims, and that framing erases the contributions of communities that have thrived across the Muslim world for centuries: Armenians, various Christian communities, Jewish communities, Zoroastrians, Mandaeans in Iraq.” The bigger gap, she argues, is as much chronological as definitional— a silence that falls between the 16th and 21st centuries, when contemporary contributions from the region stopped being charted.“ Those contributions never stopped. There was only a time when, for whatever reasons, they stopped being highlighted.”
It’ s a gap she believes the next generation is already closing— in the diaspora communities the Museum serves, among the“ in-betweeners” whose hybrid identities resist a single label, and in exhibitions like Don’ t Ask Me Where I’ m From, which brought together about fifteen contemporary artists exploring that very condition.“ If you look at the in-betweeners as a whole new demographic,” she says,“ the creativity and innovation they can generate, based on their interconnected experiences, have enormous potential.”
A Museum Reshaping How Muslim Civilizations Are Seen Asked what remains unfinished after nearly a decade at the
Photos Courtesy of the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto
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