Remastered
New, exhilarating ways to immerse yourself in timeless stories of courage, love, and living well.
July 25, 2021 - September 6, 2021
Remastered allows you to dive deeper than ever before into the Museum’s world-class collection of Persian, Turkish, and Mughal Indian manuscript paintings. Anchoring the exhibition will be a selection of 11 resplendent masterworks that rarely go on display, let alone together. Digital interactives developed in collaboration with Ryerson University Library enable you to explore an additional 40 pieces and see stirring stories from the manuscripts come to life.
Engage with classic manuscripts in the Museum’s Collection
The exhibition is centred on 11 stations, each one boasting a painting from the Museum’s Collection and several digital interventions highlighting other works from the same manuscript. Digital interventions you will encounter include:
- 3-D: Holographic 3-D visualizations of paintings from the Collection, revealing how artists in the Persian, Ottoman, and Mughal traditions depicted space and perspective
- Animation: Eye-popping interpretive animations, inspiring the same awe a premodern reader might have experienced while viewing the illustrations by flickering candlelight
- Interaction: Smartphone interactives inviting you to uncover hidden facts, stories, and sounds and make new connections with other objects in the Collection
- Restoration: Digital restorations of damaged art works, showing you how the manuscript paintings might have looked when they were first completed
Timeless stories of hope and overcoming
Remastered celebrates the ability of the human spirit to overcome adversity. Divided into three sections, the exhibition focuses on enduring qualities of the human condition — Courage, Love, and Exemplary Living — that can guide us as we navigate the challenges and changes of the COVID-19 era. Drawing on stories that have stood the test of time, Remastered invites you to embrace art’s power to bring beauty, inspiration, and fresh perspective into our lives, even in the most difficult of times.
Born out of adversity
The story of the exhibition itself is one of overcoming adversity. Temporarily unable to borrow objects from other institutions because of COVID-19-related travel restrictions, the Aga Khan Museum had to look closer to home for inspiration for its next special exhibition.
The Museum’s rich trove of manuscript paintings provided no shortage of magnificent art and inspiring stories from which to choose. Displaying more than a small snapshot of our holdings, though, can be a challenge. Manuscripts with multiple paintings can only be open to one page spread at a time. And single folios, like all works on paper, can only be displayed for so long before they become damaged by the light.
Innovation through collaboration
The solution lay right here in Toronto. By partnering with Ryerson University Library — and with holographic displays generously loaned by Looking Glass Factory — the Museum harnessed the power of technology to show many pieces from the same manuscript simultaneously, opening new windows on historical masterpieces.
Remastered, though, is more than just an interactive yet touchless exhibition showcasing highlights from the Museum’s Collection. This collaboration between two community-leading institutions has resulted in one of the most innovative and vividly immersive exhibitions of Islamic manuscript paintings ever to have been assembled.
IN THE NEWS
Ryerson University Library, November 30, 2020
Ryerson University Library partners with the Aga Khan Museum to create digital experiences for pilot project and the Museum’s Remastered
Curator: Dr. Michael Chagnon
Presented in partnership with:
