Exhibition trail of transcultural relationships of objects in the Museum für Islamische Kunst

How did the façade of a desert palace end up in Berlin? Why is there a painting showing the Pope on an Arabian carpet?What secret knowledge migrated from Iraq all the way to Italy? The objects on display in the Museum für Islamische Kunst reveal the traces of transcultural relationships. They bear witness to the astrological, medical, technical, and artistic knowledge of classical Greece, the Far East, and ancient Persia – and to the changing ways in which the objects were perceived in the course of European history.

An exhibition trail in the Museum für Islamische Kunst traces the paths by which a wide range of objects migrated across continents and the ways in which motifs, shapes, and production techniques reveal a network of relationships between widely differing cultures – cultures which are not necessarily associated with “Islamic art” today. Thus the trail questions modern assumptions about cultural boundaries and epochs, and with them, the whole notion of “Islamic art” as a separate category. 

The exhibition trail was developed by the “Objects in Transfer” project in a collaboration between the Collaborative Research Center “Episteme in Motion” (at the Freie Universität Berlin) and the Museum für Islamische Kunst.