Reopening last week after a comprehensive redesign, the Institut du monde arabe's museum of Islamic art faces some significant competition, writes David Tresilian in Paris Closed since 2009 pending a complete redesign, the Institut du monde arabe's museum of Islamic art reopened to the public last week amid a media campaign that stressed the restyling of the gallery spaces and the new presentation of the works on show. The redesign has been carried out by Italian exhibition designer Roberto Ostinelli, and there has been much rethinking behind the scenes about the character and identity of "Islamic art" and what the Institut wants the public to understand by this term. Recent years have seen new museums of Islamic art opening in the Gulf, notably in Qatar, where the Doha Museum of Islamic Art, housed in a building designed by American architect I.M. Pei, has established itself as perhaps the leading international institution in the field. There have also been a number of innovative redesigns of existing spaces, with the Cairo Museum of Islamic Art reopening in 2010 following an eight-year redesign, and the Metropolitan Museum of New York reopening its Islamic art department, now renamed "Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia," late last year following a comprehensive redesign. There is also more to come. International audiences have already been alerted to the imminent reopening of the Louvre's department of Islamic art this summer, to be hosted in a spectacular new extension to the museum's existing buildings designed by architect Rudy Ricciotti. The department's new exhibition spaces, the first major addition to the Louvre since Pei's famous pyramid in the 1980s, have involved excavating under the existing Louvre courtyards on the banks of the Seine and using cutting-edge engineering techniques to create a veil-like roof of glass above the Visconti courtyard. With all this activity in the field, the Institut du monde arabe's rather more modest museum of Islamic art faces some heavy competition. It neither has a landmark new building nor the budget to carry out a vast extension or redesign. The recent emergence of many new public institutions devoted to collecting and exhibiting Islamic art, along with the growth of a network of wealthy private collectors, has meant that there may not be enough Islamic art to go round. On the rare occasions when major pieces come onto the market, European museums cannot compete with the collections budgets of Gulf-based institutions. Creating a major collection of Islamic art today would be almost as difficult as creating a collection of French impressionist paintings: all the major works are already in public and private collections, and any that aren't are likely to be beyond the means of any but the very wealthiest collectors. Walking through the new exhibition spaces at the Institut's new museum last week, it was hard to push such thoughts entirely to the back of one's mind. Does Paris really need two new museums of Islamic art, given that the Institut's collection will soon be dwarfed by that on show at the Louvre? If it does, how might the Institut's collection, rather thin in some areas and without the prospect of significant new additions, differentiate itself in terms of display and organisation from those on show elsewhere? While the Institut has clearly wanted to address these and other questions, there may be opportunities that it has not taken. THEMATIC EXHIBITION DESIGN: The museum spaces stretch from the seventh to the fourth floors of French architect Jean Nouvel's 1987 building, raising questions about how well adapted the latter is for museum use. There are some attractive double- volume areas, and Nouvel's steel-and-glass architectural design certainly does not stint on natural illumination. On the other hand, there are also some cramped, single-volume spaces possibly originally intended as office areas. There are a lot of stairs, making it difficult for visitors easily to appreciate the connections between spaces and impossible to establish visual links between them. Visitors will have to make up their own minds as to whether a corridor-like mezzanine area, flagged as a dossier exhibition space, adds anything to the overall itinerary or whether it is a confusing distraction. Cairo's Museum of Islamic Art, contained in a set of grand, neo-Mamluk exhibition spaces, takes a broadly chronological approach to Islamic art, organising it in terms of major dynasties, Omayyad, Abbasid, Ayyubid and so on, and in terms of geographical areas. This means that though some might feel that the display could do with more interpretation -- the museum has no print or online catalogue and no take-aways for visitors like guidebooks or souvenir items -- the galleries contain attractive maps explaining the various Islamic dynasties and the geographical origins of the works on display. The Institut du monde arabe's new museum does not follow this chronological and geographical scheme, choosing instead to present the collection thematically. This has the advantage of not overloading the visitor with dates and dynasties, which in any case are only marginally related to the pieces on show. If the intention behind displaying Islamic art is to make a case for that art's aesthetic qualities, then it is a moot point as to whether it is a good idea to imply that it should be seen as illustrating background history. There are no timelines or maps in the Institut's new redesign, traditional features of older presentations, and there are no narrative wall-texts of the sort that explain the historical background to Islamic art and the rise and fall of different rulers and dynasties. Instead, there is immersive audio material, the sound of a muezzin wafting into earshot as visitors look into a display case containing religious items, or scratching and rubbing sounds providing an audio background to a display of traditional jewelry. There are film projections that are less to provide explanatory content than to create a sort of broadly Arab atmosphere. Perhaps one of the greatest advantages of a thematic presentation as far as museum curators are concerned is that it can help disguise lacunae in collections. If a collection does not contain major pieces from the Abbasid period, for example, than an arrangement of that collection by date and dynasty is going to be pretty unforgiving. For the visitor, too, a thematic presentation can have advantages, such as those described above. On the other hand, it can also have disadvantages since it does not necessarily allow visitors to place material historically or geographically. When a thematic presentation is built around themes such as "beauty" and "the city," such as at the Institut's new museum, there is the danger that almost any material could be brought in to illustrate such themes, without clarifying that material's original use or function or the circumstances of its production. Such an approach could do more to confuse than to enlighten visitors, with elements from Spain and Samarkand being brought together to illustrate the beautiful, for example, or pieces produced in 1160 or 1960, if geographical and chronological considerations are felt to be unimportant. Perhaps the Institut's display does not make quite these kinds of juxtapositions, but it does make others, neighbouring display cases containing pearl-fishing materials from the Gulf and saddle bags made by Touareg nomads from southern Algeria, for example, presumably to illustrate craft techniques, materials linked to livelihoods, or possibly geographical extension and the Arab world's linking of desert with ocean. In general terms, while there is coherence within display cases, indicating why such sets materials have been brought together, there is not always coherence between them. At present the museum has no catalogue, though one is planned, so short of making a list of what is on display it is difficult to comment on individual pieces. However, a striking feature of the new design is that there is little obvious grading of the pieces that would indicate which are to be taken as the most significant. Here the Institut may have missed an opportunity, since an exhibition strategy that gathered thematically related pieces around a masterpiece that could be explained in detail would have helped to explain the categories used and the relation of the pieces to them. The absence of an audioguide should be noted since keying in selected masterpieces to a handheld visitor guide would have enabled masterpieces to be identified and layered content provided. As it is, there is no room to provide detailed commentary on the museum's print labels, which, unlike the wall-texts, are in French only. The Arabness of Islamic art: Aside from the museum's thematic organisation, the main new feature of the design has been a desire to focus on its Arab content, rather than on pieces coming from the wider Islamic world, and to bestow a new interpretation of what such Arab content might signify. According to Marie Foissy, the museum's head curator, the idea has been to stress the diversity of Arab populations and of the Arab world. "The museum focuses on Arabness and not on Islam," she says, "by taking into account the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the Arab world. The Islamisation of areas that had been inhabited since antiquity did not always lead to the Arabisation of the populations. Some of these have preserved their own languages and cultures, like the Amazighs (Berbers), Kurds, Assyro-Chaldeans and Syriacs. Islamisation did not always lead to the disappearance of the religions in place before the Arab conquests, either, mainly Judaism and Christianity, or of the various ancestral traditions linked to these." The museum shares the conventional emphasis on Islamic art's being linked to the lives of the communities that produced it, inevitable since the category is something of a convenient hold-all for materials produced over a vast geographical area, from the Atlantic Ocean to Central Asia, at least, and including Iran, India, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa as well as the Arab world, and over a very long period. Islamic art is made up of materials that in other circumstances would probably be divided into craft items, such as metalwork, ceramics, wooden inlays and glassware, architectural design, such as building motifs and decorative schemes, the history of science and technology, such as scientific instruments, and book design, such as calligraphy and manuscript illumination. Where it is less conventional is in the museum's restricting of its definition to the Arab world, related to its mandate as part of the Institut du monde arabe, and its focus on ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity. The first pieces the viewer sees on entering the exhibition spaces through a long, dark corridor of video projections are alabaster figurines, unlabeled, but according to the accompanying publicity material dating from the 1st century BCE and made in southern Arabia. Like other materials on display -- a figurine of the goddess Al-Lat from Syria dating from the 1st century CE, a ninth-century Byzantine image of Christ Pantokrator, a 19th-century Torah case used by Baghdad's Jewish community, and so on -- these are intended to extend conventional representations of the Arab world and to underline its historical depth and historical and present diversity. In this project of "seeing the Arab world otherwise," the Institut has been assisted by presumably permanent loans from French and Arab institutions, as well as by a network of private collectors. When the catalogue appears it will be possible to construct a list of lending institutions and understand the full provenance of the pieces on display. For the time being, the Louvre and the musée du quai Branly in Paris have lent pieces, as have museums in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan, Tunisia and Syria, all linked in one way or another to the Institut du monde arabe. As Eric Delpont, the museum's director of collections, explains, this loan policy has helped to make up for gaps in the collection. One wonders, though, whether the Institut has made the most of its position in Paris and of its sometimes stated intention, not emphasised at last week's opening, of acting as "a museum of Arab museums." Cooperation agreements do not have to be about physical loans, and it might have been possible, given the museum's desire to act as a kind of focal point in a network of Arab museums and to represent the full diversity of their collections to a European and international public, to make greater use of the new technologies. The gallery spaces of the new museum are chaste in this regard, aside from the use of occasional projections, and there are no interactive displays of the kind adopted by many museums earlier this decade. If it was not possible to organise further physical loans from Islamic art and other museums in the Arab world, could it not have been possible to organise virtual links through real-time or other streaming, bringing the Arab world's museums to Paris, as it were, through the technological innovations made available by the new technologies? In sum, the Institut du monde arabe's new museum of Islamic art raises many interesting questions regarding the meaning and display of this material in an increasingly competitive environment. The choices it has made are understandable, given the nature of the collection and the mandate of the institution, and some of them are even radical, suggesting a new way of seeing the Arab world in its full richness and diversity and further questioning the adequacy of the catch-all label of Islamic art. On the other hand, some visitors are likely to miss the guidance a chronological and geographical approach to presentation could have provided, as well as the interpretation a well- conceived audioguide could provide when linked to a set of landmark works. Has the museum been too radical in its redesign or not radical enough? This question might occur to visitors curious to see how the collection develops and curious, too, about the role of the museum as a "museum of Arab museums" and how well it will stand up to the formidable competition to come from the Louvre.
