DrVirginie Rey

Non-Western museologies; community museums; unofficial forms of heritage;
practices; diasporic heritage; Middle East and North Africa; Islamic art

Projects
Muslim Museums: Exhibiting Islam in Multicultural Societies

Muslim Museums examines how contemporary Muslim communities living in Western
Europe, Australia and North America are using the museum as a medium to think
about and curate their identity in non-Muslim-majority societies. I will do so
through an ethnographic study of both already-established Muslim-led museums
and forthcoming curatorial projects, in the USA, Canada, England, Germany,
Switzerland and Australia. This serves the project's theoretical aim of
gaining insight into the articulation of a global Islamic identity, that
exists and grows outside the geographical boundaries traditionally associated
with it, whilst being simultaneously informed by global forces and
circumstances.

Sarina Wakefield, Virginie Rey. Creative Processes, Patrimonial Practices: Art
and Heritage in the Middle East and North Africa.

Creative Processes, Patrimonial Practices seeks to map out, analyse and
articulate the meanings of connections between art--as a medium (e.g.
painting, music, literature, and dance), a form of expression and a discipline
--and heritage within public and private cultural institutions of the Middle
East and North Africa (MENA). Contributors seek to examine how artists,
architects, curators and digital content producers engage with various
elements of aesthetic practice to produce, re-produce an challenge cultural
representations and narratives.