How can the museum reflect who we are?
Hekayyatna is curating a community-led exhibition at the Horniman Museum, opening 3 December 2026 and we want your input…
The Horniman Museum in south-east London has an extensive collection from our region: South West Asia & North Africa.
A shepherd's cap from Palestine. Sandals from Algeria. A prayer mat from Jordan. Pen reeds, kerchiefs, an amulet, a bridal skirt from Tunisia, a plastic ruler picked up in Egypt and catalogued under ‘Taiwan’…
We’re calling these ‘belongings’ rather than objects, because that is what they are: they belonged to someone, they came from somewhere. And they arrived here by routes that are rarely written down.
Each belonging carries a museum record: a number, a material, a place, a sentence or two of description (at most). Those records were written by people who, for the most part, were far from the communities who made and used these belongings.
The information around these belongings is rarely careful and sometimes outright wrong: Persian catalogued as Arabic, a misbaha described as a tool for making decisions, a man's praying posture rendered incorrectly in cast lead, a label that says one country where we would say another.
Below, you can look through a selection of these belongings alongside exactly how the Horniman Museum describes them (the real record, unedited). Then you can respond, in whatever way makes sense to you:
Rewrite the label: say what the museum record doesn't. The context, the meaning, the use, the name for it in your language.
Imagine its journey: write the story back into it. Who made it, who wore it, who kept it, and how it ended up here.
Can be a historical record of a similar belonging in your family or a fiction imagination of what this belonging says.
Respond in dialogue: send us something of your own: a drawing, Tatreez, a photograph, a poem, a scribble on the back of a receipt. Anything inspired by these belongings.
Selected responses will be included into a year-long exhibition at the Horniman Museum, opening December 2026, alongside new work by commissioned artists. Submissions will enter the museum's own records so that whoever reads these belongings next reads you too.
Submissions close 14 September 2026.
Note: this is for the SWANA community to respond to our belongings. You don't need to be an artist, a writer, or an expert. You need to have a relationship with something in this collection or a question about it.
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