The Iraq Museum of Baghdad is to display 40 ancient artefacts at the Venice Biennale this year, including several that were recently returned after its looting in 2003. The exhibition will be the first time all the objects have been legally allowed out of the country.

Ancient clay pots, medical objects, musical instruments and figurines of deities and animals will be among the items on display, some of which date back to 6,100 BC.

It will be the first time since 1988 that permission has been granted for anything from the museum’s collection to leave Iraq. The museum reopened in 2015 after being closed for 12 years while the stolen and smuggled objects taken during the invasion of Iraq were recovered.

The display in the National Pavilion of Iraq at the biennale will be in direct response to what co-curator Tamara Chalabi describes as the “cultural genocide” happening at the hands of Islamic State across Iraq and Syria.

“It is more important than ever that people outside of Iraq see these objects and understand their cultural significance, at a time when they are being nihilistically destroyed in Palmyra, in Nimrud, in Mosul,” said Chalabi, speaking on the second day of an attempt by Iraqi forces to reclaim western Mosul from Isis.

“These objects do have a universality that transcends geography and I think that’s such an important message to be relaying at this time and against the global backdrop of a place like Venice. It fights a cultural prejudice people have and the perception that there is no art now left in Iraq or nothing left worth saving.”

A clay figurine of a fertility goddess, c5,000 BC. Photograph: Iraq Museum/Ruya Foundation

The Ruya Foundation, which is organising the exhibition at Venice, had to fight against an “open reticence” from the Iraqi authorities and people at the museum to let any objects out of the country, Chalabi said.

“The closed attitude is very entrenched in authorities, which is obviously a result of the looting and a desire to protect what has been left, so they were hard to persuade.

“The idea of loaning or having visiting exhibitions is just absent, and yet they are sitting on some of the most interesting antiquities in the world. Ironically, up until now, unless something has been looted and stolen, it’s been almost impossible for it to come out of Iraq.”

For Chalabi, a historian, it was important to include a few of the 15,000 objects which were looted from the museum’s collection during the fall of Saddam Hussein, a third of which have subsequently been returned. Among the recovered objects to go on display in Venice are a small weight measure shaped like a dove and a clay figurine of a fertility goddess. Both were returned to the museum from the Netherlands in 2010.

Small weight measure in the shape of a dove Photograph: Iraq Museum/Ruya Foundation

Rather than selecting the museum’s rarest items for the pavilion, simple artefacts representative of the collection as a whole were prioritised. Everyday objects will be showcased, such as a contract of adoption and a clay school text, both from the Babylonian period.

The collection is under such strict security that the curators were not allowed into the museum’s storage and instead had to have each item brought out specifically.

The exhibition will be titled Archaic, and will also feature new work of eight Iraqi artists. Chalabi said the pavilion offered a rare opportunity to bring together Iraq’s ancient and contemporary culture, which is “shrouded in mystery and prejudice for so many people”.

She said she hoped it would finally open up cultural channels in and out of Iraq, and break away from the thinking that the only way to preserve and save the collection was to keep it “hermetically sealed inside the museum”.

“There such a dichotomy between the ancient and the current and everything else in the middle gets lost,” she added. “So this is trying to connect the two – Iraq as the cradle of civilisation, Garden of Eden of ancient times, and then the war, destruction and chaos of today – and create a dialogue between the old and the new.”

The historian is the daughter of Ahmed Chalabi who, as the leader of the exiled US-funded Iraqi National Congress, advised the government of George W Bush to go to war