Darat al Funun — The Khalid Shoman Foundation
دارة الفنون - مؤسسة خالد شومان
A home for the arts of the Arab world in Amman since 1988: the Khalid Shoman Collection of over 140 artists, an art library open for research, a video archive, and a documented record of every exhibition, talk and screening it has held.
- Access
- Partly open
Part of the collection is online; the rest is by request or consulted in person.
What it holds
- The Khalid Shoman Collection — works by over 140 artists across a wide range of media
- An archive of past exhibitions, workshops, talks, film screenings and performances, plus a video archive
- A research library, a PhD fellowship on art in the Arab world, and artist residencies
Darat al Funun states its aims in four clauses: to provide a platform for contemporary Arab artists, to support art practices and artistic exchange, to stimulate critical discourse, and to research, document and archive Arab art. Its story, it says, goes back to 1988. It occupies six renovated historical buildings and warehouses overlooking downtown Amman, houses dating from the 1920s and 1930s, with an excavated archaeological site in the garden where digging began in 1993.
The collection is the Khalid Shoman Collection, holding works by over 140 artists across a wide range of media. Its scope is the Arab world rather than Palestine specifically, which is precisely why it belongs in a Palestinian researcher’s list: an institution that has been collecting, exhibiting and publishing on Arab art from Amman since 1988 holds a record of Palestinian artistic work made in exile that no Palestine-specific institution founded later can fully reproduce. Check it before concluding that a work or an exhibition is undocumented.
The archive proper is the record of activity. Darat al Funun publishes an archive of its current and past exhibitions, workshops, talks, film screenings and performances, together with a video archive — which means that four decades of Arab art discourse, much of it otherwise unrecorded, has a searchable trace. Alongside it sit the library, the publications list, a PhD fellowship encouraging research on art in the Arab world, a Summer Academy, and a residency programme. The institution’s own summary of what it opens to researchers is direct: it opens its library and archives for research.
Practical notes. The site is a WordPress installation whose clean URLs and ?page_id= forms both work but do not always render identically; if a page appears to contain only navigation, try the ?page_id= variant. The collection has a separate dedicated site. And the library and archive are consultable in Amman — this is a physical institution with a digital shopfront, not a digitised collection, so plan a visit rather than a search.
Sources
The archive itself
The guide above is written by FALASTEEN.AI. The collection it describes is held, catalogued and kept by The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman, and every claim on this page traces to the archive's own pages, linked in full.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Darat al Funun — The Khalid Shoman Foundation.” The Archives, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/archives/darat-al-funun.- MLA
“Darat al Funun — The Khalid Shoman Foundation.” The Archives, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/archives/darat-al-funun. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-darat-al-funun, title = {Darat al Funun — The Khalid Shoman Foundation}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/archives/darat-al-funun}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }