Making research accessible in exhibitions

The exhibition “Memory – Moments of remembering and forgetting” relies not only on research carried out by staff at the museum but also on findings contributed by external scholars. Examples include Simonetta Morselli and Sebastian van Doesburg from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México on the Lienzo de Tecamachalco from Mexico; Christian Prager of the University of Bonn on the Tikal lintels from Guatemala; and Manuel Medrano of the University of St Andrews on Peruvian khipu in the context of the Harvard Khipu Project.

The exhibition “Striking patterns” (21 October 2016 – 26 March 2017) featured textile works acquired in the context of a research project in eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste the year before in the course of which exhibition curator Richard Kunz and guest curator Willemjin de Jong traced Alfred Bühler’s footsteps who had undertaken a collecting expedition there in 1935. Their research focused on the question of how ikat art had changed over the last eighty years and how economic constraints, global commodity flows, and social interdependencies had impacted on the dynamics. At the same time, they took stock of current fashions and trends in local ikat weaving.

The exhibition “Thirst for knowledge meets collecting mania” (22 March 2019 – 22 November 2020), in its turn, opened up new fields of research, for instance, on the collector Annemarie Weis or on sacred objects of the Zuni people.