The Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO® (MACS MTO®) presents The Heart’s Desire (Le désir du cœur), the museum’s fourth exhibition opening 3 October 2026. Curated by Jessica Cerasi, the exhibition explores longing in all its forms, without judgment and regardless of whether its object may ever be attained. Rather than a feeling to be repressed or overcome, this deeply human quality can become a generative force across creative, emotional and spiritual realms.
The concept of desire
Longing (shawq in Arabic) runs deeply through Sufi thought, expressed in stories from Layla and Majnun to the Rose and the Nightingale, and in the poetry of such teachers as Rumi, Ibn Arabi, and Rabia Basri. Rumi’s celebrated parable of the ney, the reed flute cut from its reed bed and crying out for return, captures the Sufi understanding of separation as the very condition that awakens love. Far from a melancholic state, shawq is described by Sufi masters as a fire that burns away attachment and illusion, animating the path toward union with the divine.
Around the collection
The exhibition draws on the museum’s permanent collection. Among the highlights is a 19th-century Qajar prayer tunic from Iran, hand-painted in cotton with verses from the Quran, its symmetry, white ground and boteh (paisley) motifs reflecting the garment as a symbolic mirror of the wearer’s spirit. Also featured is a 16th-century Safavid combination padlock: four rotating brass bands engraved with Arabic letters, opened only by the precise alignment of a four-letter password. Optional: The object resonates with the Sufi metaphor of the heart as a locked space whose access requires inner transformation, and with the science of letters, in which the alignment of divine Names is understood to unveil successive layers of reality.
Curator Jessica Cerasi shares, “The exhibition hopes to tap into something fundamental and deeply relatable: the perseverance and hopefulness of the human spirit, held within this galvanising, tender state of yearning.”
Artists : Rand Abdul Jabbar, Burçak Bingöl, Sarah Brahim, Faissal El-Malak, Han Mengyun et Haroon Mirza.
Curated by Jessica Cerasi.
