*Programme subject to change - please check back for updates
Bita Pourvash
This presentation explores the curatorial possibilities and challenges of exhibiting digital simulation artworks in dialogue with historic and contemporary works as part of broader exhibition narratives. Focusing on the exhibition Game On! at the Aga Khan Museum, the talk examines how participatory digital artworks can expand curatorial approaches by shifting visitors from observational viewing toward immersive and embodied experience.
At the centre of the discussion is Damask Rose (2026), a digital simulation artwork by Syrian-Canadian artist and technologist Jawa El Khash. Inspired by the 18th-century fountain of the Azem Palace in Damascus, the work invites visitors to navigate a digitally reconstructed environment while encountering fragments of history, memory, and material culture. Drawing on Syrian objects in the Museum’s collection alongside the artist’s personal memories and processes of digital reconstruction, the work proposes new ways of engaging with visual and architectural heritage beyond static display.
Using this artwork as a case study, the presentation reflects on the curatorial and spatial questions that emerge when exhibiting works that must be navigated and experienced rather than simply viewed. It considers how interactive digital installations shape visitor movement, pacing, participation, and collective engagement within gallery spaces, and how these behaviours in turn influence exhibition design and interpretive strategies.
More broadly, the presentation explores how digital simulation artworks can reshape exhibition experiences through storytelling, historical interpretation, and multisensory encounters with visual culture within museum environments.
About
Curator, Aga Khan Museum
Since joining in 2012, Bita has been involved in numerous exhibitions and curatorial projects, including co-curating Light: Visionary Perspectives (2024), Transforming Traditions: The Arts of 19th-century Iran (2018) and curating contemporary installations Cultured Pallets (2023) and Faig Ahmed: Dissolving Order (2019). In her role, Bita researches the Museum Collections, working closely on the biannual themed installations in the Gallery.
She has contributed to several exhibition catalogues and delivered lectures on the Museum’s collection. Prior to joining the Museum, she worked as a researcher at the Royal Ontario Museum and as a lecturer at York University, Semnan University, and the Higher Education Center for Iranian Heritage.
Isabella (Izzy) Inskip
In 2024/2025, I took part in an eight-month learning experience led by the Digital Lab for Islamic Visual Cultures and Collections in collaboration with Maxime Durand (Ubisoft, World Design Director). The learning experience brought together a diverse student development team with the goal of creating the framework for a historically informed video game set in tenth-century Cordoba, Digital Munya 3.
Within this project, I became part of the history team, working to provide historical research to inform everything from character and set design to plot points and game mechanics. Whilst I had studied the visual culture of the premodern Islamic world before, this was the first time I had been asked to use my academic training as an Art Historian to help create a fully immersive environment.
This paper will examine my experience of taking part in this learning experience and how I have integrated some of the methods I used while researching for Digital Munya 3 into my current Doctoral research. I will also look at how digital visualisation tools can aid in highlighting gaps in our knowledge and helping us to engage with educated guesswork.
About
PhD Candidate, University of Edinburgh
Isabella (Izzy) Inskip focuses on South Asian and Mughal visual culture, using digital visualisation to explore the social and political significance of Mughal encampments during the 17th c.
She is currently a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, where she also works as a Multimedia Technician in the uCreate Makerspace.
Izzy has an undergraduate degree in Fine Art and a Master’s (MSc) degree in Global Premodern Art from the University of Edinburgh. During her undergraduate degree, Izzy studied Sculpture and History of Art, developing her practice as a digital sculptor as well as her interest in pre-modern Islamic visual culture.
She is passionate about historically - informed storytelling and creating accessible outputs from academic research.
Ahmed El Shaer
This talk investigates how video games have been taken up as an artistic medium in the Arab world, tracing a trajectory from the region’s early gaming cultures to contemporary practices in game-based art, machinima, and immersive media. I situate these developments within longer histories of games–art entanglement and the institutional recognition of video games. I'll discuss works by Arab artists who repurpose game technologies to engage political, social, and personal histories, including Wafaa Bilal, Marwa Benhalim, and Sameh Al Tawil. I'll also discuss events such as CairoTronica, Interference, and the Machinima Marathon, arguing that they show Arab video game art as simultaneously locally grounded and transnationally legible. By expanding game-art discourse beyond Euro-American centres, I will argue for video games as a vital contemporary art language for articulating Arab archives, publics, and futures.
About
PhD Candidate, Abertay University
Ahmed El Shaer is a contemporary artist born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1981 who currently lives and works in Scotland, UK. El Shaer is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans the mediums of installation, photography, sound, and moving images, with a particular interest in new technologies. He holds a B.F.A. from the Faculty of Art and Education and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the computing and games department at Abertay University, Scotland. He has exhibited in numerous international art venues, including at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022. His work has been recognised with numerous awards including the Fulbright fellowship at UCLA Game Lab and has held several artist-in-residence programs. His work is in public collections, including New Cinema in Paris, France, and the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo, Egypt and his works have been featured in publications such as Contemporary Practices Magazine, and Hanan al-Cinema Affections for the Moving Image.
Deniz Vural
In a video game market dominated by Western game studios, the presence of Orientalist narratives in games depicting the Islamicate world and cultures is not entirely surprising. However, although the market is diversifying with more video game studios and developers from outside North America and Europe joining the production lines, the misrepresentation of Islamicate cultures in the market remains prevalent. This is partially due to the fact that non-Western companies and creators can misrepresent their own cultures and histories and therefore also disseminate Orientalist stereotypes.
This talk aims to identify and analyse examples of (self-)Orientalism in not only video games but also other examples of new media by studios based in the MENA region, focusing primarily on Turkish video games -including mobile games- and television series. Furthermore, this talk will also look at examples of Orientalist stereotypes being perpetuated by popular East Asian video game studios in their depiction of Islamicate cultures.
Muzaffer Özgüleş, PhD
This presentation argues that story-driven, puzzle-based educational narrative pioneered in popular children's literature offers a highly effective model for communicating architectural heritage to broad public audiences in the digital age. The starting point is Architect Sinan Adventure (Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2016; now in its 24th edition), a children's novel structured around a computer game adventure through the life and buildings of the Ottoman master architect Sinan. The book's game-within-a-story architecture, in which readers solve puzzles, visit real buildings, and encounter historical facts through an immersive narrative, was designed from the outset with screen adaptation in mind; all animation, film, and interactive media rights have been retained accordingly.
The presentation uses this project as a springboard to propose a broader initiative: a multilingual popular science animation channel focused on architectural history, the first of its kind, with the Architect Sinan Adventure animated series as its proposed flagship content. A script outline drawn from the novel's existing structure represents the first concrete step toward that goal. Inspired by the Kurzgesagt model of rigorous, visually driven science communication, the channel is conceived as a sustainable media platform capable of reaching diverse age groups and language communities globally.
A central aim of this presentation is to explore how the Digital Lab Days network might serve as a catalyst for initiating and sustaining such a project connecting the expertise, institutional partners, and creative collaborators needed to bring it from concept to screen. The underlying methodological argument is that the most durable tools for heritage engagement are not databases or digital reconstructions alone, but narrative ecosystems: story-based properties that give audiences an emotional entry point into historical knowledge. The Sinan novel is offered as a proven foundation; the animation channel is the scalable horizon.
About
DLIVCC Researcher | GLAM
Deniz Vural specialises in Ottoman and Islamic Art History, and fashion history (MA, MScR, History and Art History, University of Edinburgh).
Her award-winning MSc thesis on the self-presentation of women in late Ottoman art looked specifically at the paintings and photographs of the artist Mihri Hanim (1885-1954).
Deniz was born and raised in Istanbul, and her areas of specialty include cultural exchanges and Westernisation in the Ottoman Empire, self-Orientalising in Ottoman and Turkish media and the representation of the Ottoman Empire in Western art and media.
Her experience is grounded in her work on Glaire's consultancy and collaboration with Ubisoft on Assassin's Creed Mirage, and our internal games R&D projects, including our follow-on Digital Munya 3 collaboration with Ubisoft World Design Director Maxime Durand.
She is interested in the possibilities that new media and especially video games offer for making Islamic visual and cultural history more accessible.
Hatem Arafa
In this short video, I present the creative journey behind designing the Assassin’s Creed Mirage crest and the in-game calligraphy artworks for the Skill Tree, exploring how Arabic calligraphy was used not only as a visual style, but as a meaningful bridge between history and contemporary game design.
I discuss how the project began when Ubisoft approached me, and how the challenge quickly became more than creating a beautiful logo: it was about finding a visual language that could evoke ninth-century Abbasid Baghdad while still feeling mysterious, dynamic, and suitable for a game like Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
About
Calligraphy Artist and Graphic Designer
Hatem Arafa is a graphic designer and calligrapher trained at the Faculty of Traditional Islamic Arts, FSMV University in Istanbul, and currently pursuing an MA in Graphic Design at Karatay University, Konya. His work bridges traditional Arabic calligraphy and contemporary design, with major projects including the logo and interior calligraphy artworks for Assassin’s Creed Mirage (Ubisoft, 2023), commemorative coins for Qatar’s World Cup (2022) and Djibouti (2024), and the interior calligraphy of the Cary Mosque (USA, 2022).
About
The Barakat Trust Research Fellow, The Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford Asst. Prof., Alanya University, Dept. of Interior Architecture
Muzaffer Özgüleş received his BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU) in 2003. He also received his MSc from METU in the Science and Technology Policy Studies program. He received his PhD in History of Architecture from Istanbul Technical University in 2013.
He taught architectural history at Plato Higher Education College in Istanbul between 2010 and 2014. He received the Barakat Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and spent the 2014-2015 academic year at the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford.
He worked at Gaziantep University’s Faculty of Architecture as an assistant professor between 2016 and 2021. He was the coordinator of the Erasmus+ project entitled “Timeline Travel: An Alternative Tool for Architectural History Learning and Teaching”, which was chosen as Good Practice Example. He is also writing, translating, editing and proof-reading architectural history and children’s books; and writing for Kumbara and Mini Kumbara children’s magazines since 2009.
He has been working at Alanya University as an assistant professor since September 2021. His recently funded Erasmus+ KA220 HED project started in December 2022 and is going to be completed in April 2025.
Hala Qasqas, PhD
This presentation introduces Riwaq intuitive as a digital archive for Syria’s living heritage, dedicated to documenting, preserving, and organizing cultural practices that remain deeply connected to memory, labor, identity, and place. The project focuses on crafts, textiles, food traditions, oral heritage, performing arts, architecture, and social spaces, treating them not only as cultural expressions but also as forms of knowledge and social history.
The presentation will focus particularly on the Riwaq of Crafts and its documentation methodology. It will discuss how the project moves from written sources, field interviews, visual documentation, and terminology collection toward structured documentation fields and a searchable digital archive. Using the silk industry in Damascus as a case study, the presentation will show how a single craft can reveal an interconnected chain of makers, materials, workshops, gendered labor, and urban life.
By bringing together heritage documentation and digital archiving, Riwaq seeks to preserve endangered forms of Syrian knowledge while making them accessible for researchers, cultural institutions, and future generations.
About
The Barakat Trust Research Fellow, The Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford; PhD in Islamic Art History, University of Victoria; Founder and Director, Riwaq: Digital Archive for Syrian Heritage; Visual Effects and Motion Graphics Editor, Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online
Dr Hala Qasqas is a scholar of Islamic art and architectural history, specializing in the cultural and material history of early modern Damascus. Her research focuses on Syrian visual culture, shadow theatre, coffeehouses, urban space, craft knowledge, and heritage documentation.
She completed her PhD in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Victoria, with a dissertation on shadow theatre and coffeehouses in early modern Damascus. She is currently affiliated with the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford, where her research examines Syrian shadow puppets as visual and material culture.
She is also the founder of Riwaq for Syrian Heritage, a digital initiative dedicated to documenting, preserving, and rethinking Syria’s living cultural heritage through structured research, archival work, and public-facing digital platforms.
In addition, she serves as Visual Effects and Motion Graphics Editor for Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, where she contributes to the production and visual development of digital educational content in Islamic art history.