A fleet of twenty small, beaten-up metal boats, each freighted with clusters of spent matches, greets visitors entering the third-floor gallery housing “Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World” at Boston College’s McMullen Museum of Art.
Spread out over two floors of the museum, “Wonders of Creation” initially feels sparse and direct. The exhibition’s opening space is small, with single wall-mounted or glassed-in objects guiding visitors from point to point. Issam Kourbaj’s installation Dark Water, Burning World (2016) is a commentary on the danger-filled flight of Syrian refugees seeking a safer place to live after the country’s 2011 civil war. It also calls back to a similar upheaval in 1220 CE, when a teenaged Zakarīyā ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī was among the Iranians who fled to Mosul, Iraq, to escape a Mongol invasion. Al-Qazwīnī would become a respected judge and professor. In the decades after leaving Iran, he wrote one of the most influential books of the era, the cosmography The Wonders of Creation and the Rarities of Existence, from which curator Ladan Akbarnia drew the exhibition’s title and curatorial inspiration.
A dervish’s elaborately carved alms bowl made from a coco de mer palm nutshell sits near illustrated pages from manuscript copies of al-Qazwīnī’s cosmography and an inkwell and pen box dating to the author’s time. Historical pieces such as these are in era-spanning conversation with the work of contemporary artists such as Kourbaj and Hayv Kahraman, whose painting Ghuraba (2024) was commissioned by Akbarnia for this exhibition.
“Ghuraba” translates as “strangers” or “foreigners,” and Kahraman’s work weaves a self-portrait from the celestial and terrestrial elements in al-Qazwīnī’s text as well as more personal iconography such as the palm tree, which connects Kahraman to both her Kurdish-Iraqi roots and current home in Altadena, CA. The conceptual weaving isn’t solely symbolic: Kahraman also wove the linen substrate upon which she painted from flax fibers, a nod to al-Qazwīnī’s discussion of weaving in the cosmography’s section on crafts.
When I reached Ghuraba at the back of the gallery I felt I’d seen an exhibition that was deeply interesting but concise, and expected a similar presentation in the second space. It turned out the third floor was something of an anteroom for the immenseness of what waited below. The second-floor gallery’s expansive stretch and cloistered demarcation of themed sections was well-suited to the cosmographical scope of al-Qazwīnī’s writings. “By listening and learning,” al-Qazwīnī is quoted in the exhibition’s wall text, “I have learned so many wonderful things, and in considering them carefully I have gained much unexpected wisdom.” The gallery’s football field–length made the sense of carefully discovering “wonderful things” an excitingly tangible reality.
The dogmatic, gorgeously illustrated specificity of astrological and religious depictions in the first section engage with the gleaming scientific precision of navigational tools like astrolabes and sextants. Further in, visitors can discover medical devices and texts, examples of craft like fine fabrics, weaponry, ceramics, and glasswork, and architectural design, all broken into sections with titles such as The Animal, Plant and Mineral Kingdoms, Superlunaries: The Celestial Realm, and Healing, Protection, and Adornment.
In the Matter Transformed: Arts of Fire and Earth section, wall text states: “The premodern science of alchemy, which sought to transform materials from one substance into another using fire and knowledge of physics and chemistry, was applied to metallurgy, glassmaking, and pigment production.” The alchemical attempt to turn a base metal such as lead into gold or silver is called chrysopoeia, and I couldn’t help but recall the findings published in May 2025 detailing that lead had been transmuted to gold, however briefly, in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider “by a new mechanism involving near-miss collisions between lead nuclei.” I wish a late addendum could be inserted into the exhibition pairing this newest alchemical transmutation with the older ones on display.
“Wonders of Creation” has a quiet power to it but also a friendliness. Though impressive in its whole, this isn’t an exhibition that you can rush through. Calling back to the exhibition’s wall text, I feel al-Qazwīnī’s quote on the imperative of listening and looking could be useful as a guide for gallery visitors on how to experience what lies ahead, to consciously lean in and sit with the minutiae of the delicately intricate specificities of many of the items on view.
You can feel the hard-won knowledge used by some to make the display’s deadly weapons and awe-inspiring fabrics. In other instances, as Akbarnia notes, that same knowledge is used “for the most banal objects that are made into these really sweet, wondrous little figures like a lion that was used for a bath scraper, sort of a medieval loofa.” Pieces like that blunt-faced, cobalt-pigmented lion almost bring more heft, for me, than something intentionally hefty like a big, bladed weapon. Both show the human touch, but the blue bath lion shows a humane touch. And that’s the beauty of the exhibition. “Wonders of Creation” makes plentiful room, in its vast cosmography, for small wonders like that.
“Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World” is open through June 1, 2025, at McMullen Museum of Art, 2101 Commonwealth Avenue.
