THE WORLD OF THE FATIMIDS, AGA KHAN MUSEUM, TORONTO, CANADA, MARCH 10-JULY 2, 2018

摘要

In an effort to bear witness to past glories, The World of the Patimids at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto recaptures a lost world through a collection of some of its most precious objects. Ambitious in both scale and scope, the exhibition strives to evoke the splendour of the Fatimid Caliphate, a multi-confessional empire whose trade networks penetrated the Mediterranean basin, Europe, Asia, and Africa. With the help of fourteen partner institutions across Europe, North America, and the Middle East, the exhibition puts several objects on public display for the first time, richly illustrating the art and aspects of life of the Fatimid era. Through a careful selection of luxury objects, the exhibition raises fascinating questions about the indigeneity of Fatimid art, which shared roots in North African, Egyptian, Mediterranean, and Islamic traditions. It highlights the interplay of local and global artistic networks, challenging constructs of Islamic art's centralized emanation, whether it be Umayyad Damascus or Abbasid Baghdad. A singular triumph of this exhibition is its inclusion of the greatest masterworks from the Islamic Art Museum in Cairo, particularly as many of these objects have never been displayed in North America before. Securing these objects for display alone speaks to the Aga Khan Museum's successful cultural diplomacy and its partner institutions' decades-long efforts to preserve the tangible and intangible heritage of the Islamic world. A case in point is the dramatic display of the soaring carved marble panels of the legendary Fatimid palaces of Cairo (al-Qahira), showcased for the first time in North America [Figure 1]. Constructed between the end of the tenth and middle of the twelfth centuries and destroyed with the rise of the Ayyubid empire in the end of the twelfth century, the Eastern and Western palaces of the Fatimids enthralled both Medieval Muslim historians and contemporary Islamic art historians. The scale and grandeur of these carved marbles, frozen in their unfinished state, provide a jarring reminder of the magnificence of the medieval Cairene palace. Architectural remnants of the lost Fatimid city, alongside drone photography of Cairo as it stands today capture a profoundly powerful art historical moment. The inclusion of luxury devotional objects, such as the magnificent carved wooden mihrab of the shrine of Sayyida Nafisa [Figure 2], several portable icon-like wooden mihrabs, and the carved rock crystal dome finial of a minbar of the Fatimid caliph al-Zahir, further highlights an understudied topic: the symbolism and function of devotional and liturgical objects within Muslim praxis.