Dubai: The ‘curiosity’ of a Dubai businessman led to a 40-year-old love affair with moving images, resulting in the first moving image museum in the Middle East.
The Dubai Moving Image Museum, which was inaugurated on Tuesday by Shaikh Majid Bin Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Chairman of the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority (Dubai Culture), is the third of its kind in the world.
“Curiosity is what makes a man think. I started my collection because I am curious about how, when and why things started,” said Akram Miknas, who has collected the 1,000 moving imagery pieces that are being showcased at the museum. The museum takes film lovers through the chronological development of visual entertainment — from manipulating shadows to more technical advances that led to the birth of cinema.
Some of the items at the museum include the camera obscura, an optical device that projects an image of its surroundings on a screen, peep-show boxes, which are objects viewed through a magnifying glass, and magic lanterns, which are image projectors from the 1700s.
Miknas’ passion and love for antiques started when he was 13 years old after his father asked him what he would like as a gift. Instead of asking for a bike or a toy, Miknas asked his father for an old tea set his family owned.
“My passion did not start with image-related items in particular but since my business is in advertising, where we shoot a lot of videos, it was natural for me to start thinking about how moving imagery started.”
The first film-related item collected by Miknas was a ‘kinora’, which is a motion picture device that creates images from a reel of printed moving papers, for €800 (Dh4,020) in Germany.
Finding reels for his ‘kinora’ proved to be difficult as Miknas learnt only 200 reels had been produced.
Passion
His determination to find a reel is what sparked his obsession with finding more pieces and starting a moving image collection.
“During business trips abroad the first thing that I would do after my meetings is go to antique stores. I got deeper and deeper into my passion and started to look at the societies and civilisations behind these objects. It became an obsession.”
Now Miknas’ collection, which is insured for $5 million (Dh18.4 million), also includes items from The Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI), which was established in the 1980s in the UK and closed in 1999.
“The first time I went to MOMI I was amazed. It was visited by a million people and had one of the most eclectic collections I have seen. To my luck it closed due to disputes with the owners and I bought many of the pieces from there.”
The pieces at the museum date back to the 1700s and come from countries such as Germany, the UK, France, Switzerland and the US.
“I want people to look back to how civilisations were to what they have become now.”
