Museum exhibits present a particular narrative of history to a public audience. In recent years the various curatorial narratives about “Islamic Art” have been hotly debated. In order to understand many of the current issues in the field, scholars have looked back to the origins of the Islamic art exhibition and the first narratives presented therein in cities such as Stockholm, London, Munich, and Istanbul. Some scholars have suggested that the chief premise of Islamic art exhibitions in Europe was to represent the private collectors’ tastes or to offer elites an opportunity to experience their exotic fantasies of the East firsthand, rather than telling the story of the civilizations or distant cultures from which the objects came. Likewise, in Ottoman Turkey, carefully selected artifacts and their juxtaposition in the first imperial museums say more about contemporary society and speak to the Ottoman court’s motivations for establishing such institutions. While examination of the historical contexts of early exhibitions aids in our understanding of the origins of the field and how it developed over time, further inquiry is necessary to conceptualize their representational modalities. What were the intended curatorial narratives of these exhibitions and how were they implemented in the gallery? What kind of experience was the museumgoer meant to have? What were they meant to take away? The curator has to understand both the objects and his audience in order to present a history comprehensible to a modern public and provide viewers an entry point for understanding distant pasts and exotic cultures. In these early exhibitions of Islamic art in Europe and Ottoman Turkey, the gallery space and configuration of objects served to represent (re-present) a lived history, which was graspable only through material objects and constructed environments. Regardless of their historical veracity, these curated environments sought to recreate a world both mysterious and coherent, cognitively distant yet tangibly close. By harnessing the power of objects to transform space and transcend time, these early exhibitions re-present history and define tradition for their “modern/izing” audiences in a profound and tangible way.