Musafiri: Von Reisenden und Gästen

In the organizer's words:

Exhibition and research project
8.3.-16.6.2025

The Arabic word musafir sounds with an astonishing phonetic coherence in different languages and cultural areas. From Romanian to Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Kazakh, Malay and Uyghur, the area of its occurrence covers an impressively wide geographical space. While the word in its original meaning and in most of these languages refers to the traveler, in Turkish and Romanian it describes the guest, i.e. the special position of being highly welcome. In Romanian in particular, musafir resonates with the privilege of the domestic sphere. It is a word reserved for those who are received in one's own home. The exhibition Musafiri: Of Travelers and Guests is rooted in the effort to create a world in which travelers can arrive and be received as guests. It follows worlds of fearless travelers, individuals and communities involuntarily displaced in the past, and the increasingly dramatic migration movements in the here and now. The exhibition traverses the worlds that open up when one leaves the confines of familiar surroundings and traces the many artistic encounters that have resulted.

Musafiri: Of Travelers and Guests speaks from the position of the present, focusing on the current manifestations of much older tensions that revolve around the question of who is welcome and who is not, whose perspectives are welcome and whose perspectives are not welcome, and who decides on these border areas. The public discourse and politics of our time (and Germany is one of the most obvious examples) is in many ways characterized by anxieties stemming from perceived threats to established (and often hegemonic) ways of seeing the world that are rooted in local perspectives. As such, the exhibition is an urgent plea for the recognition and affirmation of the polyphonic worlds of all those who have detached themselves from the places of their origin and set out on their journey.

To get to this point, the exhibition has to take a few detours (a familiar experience for many travelers), but these are through time rather than geographical space. Traveling and searching were fundamental components of notions of personal development, as many of the long-standing stories and corresponding debates in the field of narratology show us. But while embarking on a peripatetic quest can be crucial to the formation of the self, it can also be crucial to the formation of a coherent worldview. One of these detours leads via the long tradition of the idea of universality, which was developed outside the European Enlightenment. This detour reveals how such ideas have emerged from the perspectives of people who have left their worlds of origin. It would be difficult not to consider the case made by Lourenço da Silva Mendonças against slavery in the Vatican in 1684 in such a discussion. As a prince from the royal house of Ndongo (now Angola), he was a remarkable traveler and universalist. The truly historic dimension of his case, however, lies in the arguments that Mendonça put forward in his plea. His argument was based on a notion of rights that should be granted to all people, "Jews, Gentiles or Christians in any region of the world" - a century before the white abolitionist movement, and preceding the political upheavals of the late 18th century.Given this, what path should one take to challenge ideas previously attributed to the European Enlightenment (including the justifiably criticized idea of 'human rights', which was often criminally instrumentalized under the cover of a US consensus) - knowing that these ideas were first voiced by a prince from Ndongo in 1684, speaking for all humanity?

Against the backdrop of global history, Musafiri: Of Travelers and Guests deals with regional narratives. Many of the works focus on individuals who have embarked on world travels or realized projects in which they gather encyclopedic knowledge from a wide variety of cultural contexts and perspectives. The exhibition looks at times and individuals that existed before or outside the modern colonial epochs (as much as they have been overshadowed by Eurocentric historiography, the liberal myth of the heroic individual and the ethics of the traveler as a world eater). By considering the aforementioned pre-modern universalities, the exhibition takes up the challenge of developing a set of tools to do historical justice to the vast majority of anonymous travelers who, through their toil and labor, built and sustained the world of global capital. These travelers are the enslaved of the Middle Passage and the forced laborers from India, China and Indonesia who came to the Americas and also crossed the Indian and Pacific Oceans. These travelers are the immigrants of today; not only those who are still migrating towards the imperial centers, but also those who arrived on paths created by changing economic geographies; from South Asia towards the Gulf region, from Southeast Asia to East Asia, from the countries of the African continent (and Southern Europe) to South Africa, from the Andes to Brazil, and from Venezuela towards the entire Latin American hemisphere.

Many Musafiri communities have been strengthened and further connected by the spread of shared pop cultural references. The exhibition points to some of these references, in addition to a series of historical lines of connection: from the current wave of K-Pop, which is changing musical tastes, identity, ideals of beauty or notions of race in Asia and other continents, to an earlier manifestation of global interconnections, such as those formed around the Lambada fever of the 1990s, which in turn followed on the heels of cultural and sonic universes born on both sides of the Black Atlantic and fundamentally reshaped the idea of global pop culture. The exhibition is also interested in other spaces around which diasporic communities have formed, communal spaces of identification - where travelers feel like guests, even if only to each other - the geographical spaces of arrival of many Musafiri. Often interwoven with, yet separate from, the spaces for tourists (those other travelers of the modern era) are the markets, the nail salons, the hair salons and cafes - spaces where communities of mutual support thrive and tell their own stories.

Cultures and ideas traveled far and wide long before the spread of pop culture, transforming the routes along which they circulated. Even if the early awakenings stemmed from the desire for goods and commodities, knowledge, beliefs and aesthetic forms were their constant companions. Textiles can be seen as an example of these processes, interweaving historical layers, social relations and economic structures, giving value to their production and thus fueling the demand for their production and distribution. The pluricontinental and often murky histories of the colors indigo or carmine reflect this history as well as the aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual systems that have made them objects to be read and understood, to be looked at in awe or with delight - all while reflecting the subjective and unique voices of their creators.

However, it may be difficult to surpass the movements and expansions set in motion by religions. It is within the framework of belief systems that most ideas of universalism have been developed. Accordingly, many of the travelers included in the exhibition follow routes based on religious affinity and use religious systems of meaning to understand the world. In the process, many of them have developed these systems further or even left them behind after being confronted with the real complexities of the world along the way. The works shown in the exhibition trace some of these themes, for example, they refer to the journeys of wandering Sufi saints.

Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests creates attention for the narratives that disappear invisibly on the 'underside' of globalization; namely the stories of migrant workers - the anonymous workforce on the construction sites of infrastructure projects, transport workers and temporary workers, or the 'systemically relevant forces' (to use a phrase from recent pandemic times) - who either live in distant cities in their own countries (like the tens of millions of internal migrant workers leaving rural areas for the Chinese metropolises) or are on the newly emerged regional migration axes or along the established historical imperial routes. The works in the exhibition also give voice to the stories of the people who ensure the flow of these migratory movements, such as the Filipino migrant workers who make up the largest group among the crews of ships on the world's oceans. Finally, the exhibition traces the journeys of those who had to leave their homeland due to brutal forced recruitment or living conditions in order to take up arms in distant places and under foreign flags. This includes the millions of people who fought for the colonial states in the world wars and extends to the Nepalese currently enlisted by Russia to fight in Ukraine.

But the global, capitalist distribution of labour, with its exploitation of "racialized" bodies and its network of infrastructures that drives the movements of migrant workers and incorporates them into the global, capitalist machinery of production and trade, also marginalizes individuals and groups whose ability to travel is massively restricted by numerous types of borders. On this global map composed of the imagination of those subject to the control mechanisms of these labor flows - caught between endless shift work, chronic unemployment, or the often permanent state in between - another world appears to which those who have never left their villages but whose hands and dreams keep global commerce going (a dynamic also evident in Europe) aspire.

These questions ultimately lead to the one question that is perhaps the most important and touches on many of the search movements and efforts. Namely, whether we can still cherish the hope that the Musafiri will one day encounter a world somewhere in which the power of the hosts to determine who must remain a Musafir forever has been shattered and belongs only to the chronicle of a bygone era.

With contributions by:
Ulf Aminde, Alibay Bapanov, Sonia E. Barrett, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Musquiqui Chihying, Narcisa Chindoy, Chong Yan Chuah, Choy Ka Fai, Julien Creuzet, Ena de Silva, Roy Dib, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Aboubakar Fofana, Simryn Gill, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Hit Man Gurung and Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Yun-Fei Ji, Sachiko Koshikoku & Akinori Nakatani & Massao Okinaka & Yuji Tamaki (conceived and compiled by Yudi Rafael), Lawrence Lemaoana, Idas Losin, Ana Lupas, Gail Mabo, Maria Madeira, Mohammad Din Mohammad, Carlos 'Marilyn' Monroy, Diane Severin Nguyen, Haji Noor Deen Mi Guangjiang, Jimmy Ong, Zoarinivo Razakaratrimo (known as Madame Zo), Anne Samat, Citra Sasmita, Joar Songcuya, Simon Soon, Nádia Taquary, Robel Temesgen, Ryan Villamael, Ocean Vuong

In collaboration with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation - Delegation in France as part of the PARTENARIATS GULBENKIAN program to promote the Portuguese art scene in European institutions

HKW would like to thank Fondation H, Fundatia Plan B, Gomide&Co, Kestner Gesellschaft, PSM and The Esplanade Co Ltd for their cooperation.

Price information:

Tickets €8/6 Free admission every Monday, on selected Sundays, on the opening weekend 7-9.3. and on the finissage weekend 14-15.6.