Cairo Museum of Islamic Art partners with the Louvre

Louvre to show antiquities from damaged Islamic art museum in Cairo.

The Louvre in Paris has entered into a partnership agreement with the Museum of Islamic Art after the 19th-century Egyptian institution was extensively damaged by a car bomb more than two years ago.

As part of the deal the Louvre will show Egyptian artefacts from the Islamic museum which has remained closed since the bombing at the adjacent police headquarters on Port Said Street in January 2014.

The agreement includes both museums staging joint exhibitions as well as sharing resources and expertise. Curators from Paris will help their Egyptian counterparts to conserve the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art, which has since been restored but whose reopening date remains unclear.

An exhibition on the history of the Museum of Islamic Art and its connections to the Louvre is planned at the Cairo museum at some point during 2017, travelling to the Louvre at a later date.

The deal follows a recent agreement signed by Khaled El-Enany, the Egyptian minister of antiquities, and the Louvre director Jean-Luc Martinez.

The two-storey Islamic museum, whose 100,000-piece collection is one of the most important of its kind in the world, had recently undergone a $14 million renovation prior to the 2014 blast.