‘Arts of the Mongol World’ (working title) is an exhibition scheduled for the Spring/Summer 2027 season at the Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition is co-curated by Professor Sussan Babaie (The Courtauld) and Professor Shane McCausland (SOAS) with Dr. Adrian Locke (Royal Academy of Arts). It is scheduled to open at Sackler Galleries of the Royal Academy in March 2027.
This exhibition makes a crucially important point that is unlike all previous and current exhibition projects and aims to establish a new platform for future research on the period of Mongol domination across Eurasia. The layout of the exhibition and the objects that exemplify through ideological, social, spiritual, technological, and aesthetic decisions the new constellations of encounters and fertilisation generated by then newly arrived Mongol tribes and their leadership class of men and women; these deliberately eschew national identities, be it in political or art historical terms.
It also dismantles the geo-political overlay of cultures on modern national maps, while highlighting the geographical overlaps and cultural collectives through display of spectacular arts: East Asia, Himalayas, Eastern Khurasan and Central Asia, the twin Iraqs which correspond to western Iran and Iraq, and Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus, and the Levant/eastern Mediterranean Byzantine, among other local networks. The exhibition does not show routes (earlier Silk Roads that brought goods across a vast region (BM exhibition); it does not situate modern national narrative alongside a route of travel (Marco Polo, Venice); or an archaeological focus on a single Mongol entity (the Golden Horde, Nantes).
The exhibition instead conceptualises the link between local pasts and their Eurasian networks and the contemporary experiences and reflections on those local Mongol inspired pasts. Finally, this exhibition avoids glorifying the Mongols as a conquering people. That has to be acknowledged but the aim is to also demonstrate how the old, settled, and urban cultures along their routes of conquest arose from the ashes of the invasions and jumpstarted the flourishing of new cultural synthesis, responding to the patronage by the local khanates (Yuan, Ilkhanate, Chagatai, Golden Horde) and taking advantage of newly formed connected networks whereby previously unavailable technologies, materials, and styles, and aesthetic demands emerged in textiles, porcelain and ceramics, metalwork, book arts, and many other novel things.
