What happens in a museum after all the visitors have left and the lights are turned off? That’s the question that British-Algerian director Nadira Amrani’s imaginative fashion film, Museum Leila, explores with the help of model Riyam Salim and her cast of friends.

Blinking open her eyes, having dozed off inside London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, we see Salim’s Leila travelling majestically through its hallowed halls. On this nighttime escapade, she encounters figures who appear as though artworks have sprung to life and stepped out of their gilded frames. These mysterious characters are each wearing wondrous looks by Karim Adduchi, Tatyana Antoun and Nabil Nayal, whose designs draw on their respective Moroccan, Lebanese and Syrian heritage.

From shoes set on top of carved wooden plinths to joyous celebrations of pure colour, the fashion is as magnificent and layered in meaning as you might expect from the culturally rich MENA region. One of the most striking moments is seeing a model kneeling on the tiled floor, donned in a couture gown taken from Adduchi’s ‘She Has 99 Names’ collection, which was crafted from a vintage Amazigh rug.

The work was commissioned as part of the V&A’s Friday Late programme in collaboration with Art Jameel. The Saudi Arabia and the UAE-headquartered organisation is also responsible for the 2009 renovation of the museum’s now-named Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art.

"This commission was really about celebrating fashion designers from the Middle East and North African region,” Amrani explains. “Having access to the galleries during lockdown, it was quite surreal walking through the empty galleries. I thought about my many visits to the V&A and came up with this idea of Leila, a fashion student who falls asleep in the museum and is locked inside overnight. 'Leila' a woman's name but also the Arabic word for night.”

She continues: “I took a lot of references from many of the amazing exhibitions I've been to at the museum such as Postmodernism, David Bowie Is and the recent Tim Walker: Wonderful Things. With a soundtrack from the Dutch-Iranian artist Sevdaliza, the film really has a surreal darkness to it."

Words Miriam Bouteba

Published on 11/08/2021