Δ Travelling and Discovering.

The exhibition Travelling and discovering: from the Sepik to the Main puts 124 objects taken from the internationally renowned Oceania Collection of the Museum of World Cultures on show. At the beginning of the 1960s these had been acquired in Papua New Guinea by scientists of the Frobenius Institute for the Frankfort Ethnological Museum. During two research expeditions heading for the Sepik River area in the north eastern part of the island they collected carved ancestor figures, debating stools, paintings on palm leaf sheaths and “sacred flutes” – counted today among the highlights of the museum. In Frankfort these have been exhibited only twice in the past: in 1964 in the Städel’sches Kunstinstitut and in 1987 in the Kunsthalle Schirn.

Visitors are invited to enter the flow of time and undertake a journey in the company of the exhibits. We’ll start on the Sepik River at the beginning of the 1960s to gain a view into male and female spheres of life and an understanding of the institution of the men’s house. Continuing our way we will gain impressions of the collecting activities of the researchers in the field. A series of photos will introduce us to the transport of the collection from the Sepik River to the Main.

As an exemplary mode of the presentation of ethnographic objects in a museum the style of the 1960s is reconstructed: considered as scientific evidence objects are staged in the form of dioramas with photos and text panels. At the end of the journey all objects have become ‘pure’ works of art and have arrived in the gallery of the present.

In a replicated museum’s storeroom visitors will have the opportunity to get more information on the exhibits. An explorer’s handbook will help children to find the way to their own research station where they can touch things themselves.

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Δ Black Paris

Starting in the middle of March 2007 everything in the Museum of World Cultures turns around the interconnection of art and migration. The exhibition “Black Paris. Art and History of a Black Diaspora 1906 – 2006” makes it clear that the Paris of today is not only the largest African enclave in Europe but the undisputed centre of African fashion, music, art and literature. The capital of the former French Colonial Empire is a convenient place to graphically exemplify, in spatially and temporally condensed ways, the processes of cultural and artistic interaction and inter-penetration. These processes are characteristic of North-South-relations transcending the relation of Europe and Africa to include Afro-America and the Caribbean. About every fifth of the approx. 12 million people living in the area of Greater Paris is of African, Caribbean or Afro-American descendency. Their shops, publishing houses, agencies and diaspora initiatives have marked whole quarters of the city. They give the Metropolis of Paris its multicultural flair.

The exhibition takes its start from the colonial expropriation and the invention of “l’art nègre” at the beginning of the 20th century continuing through surrealism, jazz and the negrophilia of the interwar period until the international or intercontinental migrations of the sixties and seventies of the last century. The Museum of World Cultures presents “Black Paris” as the history and iconography of the French-African Metropolis mounted as a collage of historical and documentary images from the archive and of works by modern and contemporary artists.
Responsible for the concept of the exhibition is the Iwalewa - House at the University of Bayreuth.

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