Artist Residency at the Ethnological Museum and Museum of Asian Art at the Humboldt Forum Berlin

The Ethnologisches Museum (Ethnological Museum) and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (Asian Art Museum) of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (National Museums in Berlin) invite visual artists and designers to engage with the exhibition "Discovering the West" in the galleries on North Africa, West and Central Asia at the Humboldt Forum for a period of three months in the first half of 2023.

With the opening of the last exhibition spaces at the Humboldt Forum Berlin, the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst aim to continue and strengthen their collaborative approach. The inclusion of artistic thinking and research is fundamental to this, and the promotion of collaboration and a mutually productive space for artists, researchers and curators is central.

The exhibition "Discovering the West"

The exhibition deals with the reception, appropriation and reinterpretation of ideas associated with the ‘West’ in the Ottoman and Persian Empires at the end of the 19th century. Reports from the world exhibitions in Vienna and Paris were received with interest, but also critically in Tehran, Istanbul, Damascus or Cairo. Using the examples of urban redevelopment, fashion and furniture design, the exhibition focuses on how the new impressions took shape in the material and visual cultures of these cosmopolitan urban centres and how they led to concrete and far-reaching political steps. Changes in gender roles and social change are also manifest in the objects. 

Artist Residency 

As part of the residency, artists are invited to engage with the themes and objects of the exhibition and explore their meanings for the 21st century. In doing so, the creative and material aspects of the works could be considered as well as their inherent transcultural or political underpinnings. The manifold connections in the fields of art and politics, the views of the ‘West’, but also the new political alliances emerging with the independence movements could be further starting points.