Love takes many forms. In Love From Damascus: The art of devotion in Islam, love is expressed through prayer, spirituality, hospitality, friendship, and sex. It is woven into textiles and adorned with gold leaf; shaped into silverware and glazed into tiles and pots.

For this exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), curator James Bennett has selected a diverse range of objects exploring “worldly love, and divine love,” across the pre-modern Islamic world. Alongside richly illuminated manuscripts and paintings are a number of ceramics from AGSA’s significant collection, as well as silverware and embroidered textiles. Drawn from different times and places, each object provides a unique perspective on the nuances of love and devotion.

It takes the shape of an earthenware bowl from nine or 10th-century Iran that features Arabic calligraphy praising devotion through hospitality. In a 17th-century illuminated manuscript of Rumi’s Masnavi, the act of love is conveyed not only in the written content – a treatise on devotion to God – but in the intricate and laborious process of decoration. Indeed, many of the objects represent hundreds of hours of devotional labour: patterns stitched, picked out in gold, or painted in jewel tones.

Bennett emphasises the vibrant history of multi-nationalism and discourse across pre-modern Islamic nations – in contrast, perhaps, to the current perception of a perpetually fractured Middle East.

“Historically there was an incredible interchange between scholars and poets and artists,” he explains. “Artists were always moving around.”