147 x 86.5 cm (Textile)
32 x 103 cm (Wood carving)
Haus Der Kulteren (HKW)
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin
Opening Times
Wed.–Mon. 12:00–19:00
Extended opening hours during evening programmes.
Free admission to exhibitions on Mondays and on selected Sundays.
The Arabic word musafir resonates with stunning phonetic consistency across languages and within strikingly different cultural spaces, from Romanian to Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Kazakh, Malay, and Uygur, among others, in a vast, uninterrupted geography. While the original meaning and in most of these languages the word denotes that of a ‘traveller’, in Turkish and Romanian it has come to designate a ‘guest’, a position that is special and most welcomed. In Romanian, in particular, musafir resonates with the privilege of the domestic realm, a word mostly reserved for those who are received into one’s home. The exhibition Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests is thus rooted in efforts to make possible a world where travellers arrive and are received as guests. It follows worlds as they have been braided by intrepid travellers and unwillingly displaced individuals and communities in history, to the intensifying migratory movements of today. The exhibition traverses the worlds that open when one leaves the familiar confines of their corner of the world, and the many artistic conversations that are born on the cusps of these encounters.
Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests speaks from the present moment, taking into account current manifestations of much older tensions around who is welcomed and who is not, which perspectives are welcomed and which are not, and who decides on these limits. Public conversations and contemporary politics in many contexts, with Germany among the starkest examples, have become increasingly filled with anxiety over perceived threats to established (and often hegemonic) ways of seeing the world from those respective local contexts. As such, the exhibition constitutes an urgent plea to acknowledge and assert the polyphonic worlds brought together by the experience of those who have moved past their points of origin.
