Museum With No Frontiers (MWNF) is an organization whose ground-breaking program aims to establish a vast transnational museum that presents works of art, architecture and archaeology in the context in which they were created.
Inspired by the principle of organizing exhibitions without moving the works of art, MWNF is creating through modern technology an exciting new dimension to museums. The visitor is invited to experience a museum not only as a place to admire artefacts on display but also as a gateway to related works of art in other museums, relevant archaeological sites and monuments, as well as to thematic visits.
Discover Islamic Art (www.discoverislamicart.org) is the pilot project of the MWNF Virtual Museum program. For the first time, physical exhibition venues located all over Europe and the Mediterranean come together to create a joint virtual museum, thus establishing an authentic museum with no frontiers of Islamic art in the Mediterranean where visitors will be able to discover objects, monuments and archaeological sites from 14 countries and relate them to each other.
Discover Islamic Art is funded by the European Union. Since the start of the project in June 2004, a team of 120 experts from 14 countries, coordinated by MWNF, selected 850 museum objects from 42 museums as well as 385 monuments and archaeological sites. After completing the selection, the curators in charge in each country produced a detailed description for each item according to a standardized format. These descriptions are available in English, French and Arabic in addition to the local language of each country and are accessible through the database of the Virtual Museum. The visual material compiled by the local project teams includes images of all items as well as plans for most of the monuments.
At the same time, comprehensive curatorial input by experts from all the participating countries made it possible to establish, for each object or monument, a series of links to related items and to define the contents for 17 thematic exhibitions. These will be launched in spring 2007 offering explanations in eight languages.
