United Nations Alliance of Civilizations

In a 1950s letter from the American President Dwight D. Eisenhower to Roland L. Redmond, President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eisenhower wrote: “Art is a universal language and through it each nation makes its own unique contribution to the culture of mankind”. This sentiment has resonated with me since I was a boy, and indeed inspired me to collect, conserve, research, exhibit, and publish the art we are now blessed to be a custodian of. Art has the power to transcend all differences in politics, religion, race, or gender and should be harnessed to foster intercultural understanding and promote peace.

This is why at the Khalili Foundation we have spent many decades conducting what I like to call ‘Cultural Philanthropy’ – the act of giving and sharing not just through conventional financial means, but also through the production and distribution of cultural knowledge. Through the sharing of art, my hope is that a bridge can be built between nations and communities to better understand each other, to see each other clearly through the ever-increasing complexity of our world. By sharing and exhibiting art, we can remind humanity of our shared culture, of the things which make us all human.

In 1998, to echo this idea of expressing unity through art, I initiated a project that I called the House of Peace. It involved commissioning the outstanding British artist Ben Johnson to create five large paintings that would offer different views of the holy city of Jerusalem in all its diversity, in the hope that together, they can remind all who look at them of our shared heritage within its walls.

This was a direct intervention on my part, one could say, to create something which would finally express this flame that was ignited in me as a young boy. This flame was the desire to see the world brought together, to show humanity that everyone has a place, and that sharing our cultures and faith traditions with each other is the ultimate path to embracing our differences. After all, embracing one another is what art, in my view, can ultimately achieve. ‘We are angels/ who have but a single wing/and we can only fly/if we cling to one another’ as Luciano De Crescenzo wrote in Thus Spake Bellavista. My hope, and my dream, is that through art we could bring about this embrace.

Of course, it is natural for us to work closely with the international community towards this aim – and what better institution than the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), which was set up precisely to address the polarisation between societies and cultures. We are proud and honoured to work with UNAOC to share our common vision of interfaith and intercultural harmony at a time when such a reflection is so desperately needed.