The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto is exhibiting more than 40 works of Syrian art in an attempt to raise awareness of the rich cultural and artistic histories of Syria. The exhibition, entitled “Syria: A Living History,” will be on display at the museum through late February.

The exhibition was curated by Filiz Cakir Phillip, Aga Khan’s museum curator, and Nasser Rabbat, professor and director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ross Burns, an Australian historian who was the Australian ambassador to Syria and Lebanon from 1984 to 1987, worked with Phillip and Rabbat and contributed photography to the exhibition.

According to Rabbat, the exhibition was largely aimed to convey the belief that Syria has, throughout its history, been a place where multiculturalism has been both culturally and artistically productive. Rabbat told Al-Monitor that his focus for this particular exhibition was a “Western audience that has started losing faith in the notion that Syria is a cultured country and started thinking of Syria as a place that exports destitute refugees and terrorists. I wanted to go back and say, ‘Remember that this is — literally — the cradle of civilization.’”

Artwork in the exhibition represents over 5,000 years of Syrian history. The exhibition collects pieces interspersed over those millennia: A vase produced in the third millennium B.C. (on loan from the Louvre Museum) and an eye idol from 3200 B.C. (on loan from the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto) are on display, as is influential Syrian modern artist Fateh al-Moudarres’ “The Last Supper,” which was painted in 1964, and Tammam Azzam’s “Storeys Series,” a large, acrylic, black-and-white painting from 2015 depicting a fractured, hollowed-out urban neighborhood in Syria. The latter two works are on loan from the Atassi Foundation.