The Museum für Asiatische Kunst of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin places an explicit emphasis on transcultural collaboration when curating its programme. In a large-scale project running until the end of 2025 called “The Collaborative Museum” (CoMuse), it will work together with the Ethnologisches Museum to produce multiperspective approaches to exploring the collections, and will test out new formats for collaborating with an international community of museums and academics, as well as with representatives of communities of origin. In the cultural belongings held by the museum, materialised relationships between the institution and the communities of origin of these belongings are reactivated in a sensitive and just fashion for all involved. It aims at intensifying the decolonisation and diversification of museum practices in sustainable ways.
To realise this collective endeavour, the museums have launched new projects, partnership initiatives, and a fellowship program, focussing on collaborative provenance research and knowledge creation, co-produced exhibitions, outreach formats, and art interventions. CoMuse also aims at improving access to collections and digitising materials for critical examination.
The Museum für Asiatische Kunst is guided in its methods and practices of collecting, presenting and conserving artefacts, as well as its education and outreach endeavours, by the prevailing artistic and academic traditions, theories, and standards of value in the communities of origin – with visual cultures and the arts always at the forefront. Contemporary artistic approaches offer an essential and often critical contribution to how we might expand and critically engage with the collections as we move forward. When collaborating with artists, the Museum für Asiatische Kunst focusses on approaches and perspectives from the relevant regions of origin, while also opening up its collections more broadly to individuals whose working or creative practices deal either with the objects held in the museum collections or the themes to which these objects relate.
Colonial legacies and other violent histories of appropriation together with Western conceptions of museum work have led to an imbalance in the ways museums interact with the cultural belongings in their collections. Renegotiating hierarchies of interpretation and ownership of the objects forms part of a broader paradigm shift, and the museums seek to proactively engage in these processes.
Decolonial work is central to how CoMuse approaches the collections of these museums. This involves challenging and dismantling the colonial structures, narratives, power dynamics and practices historically shaping these institutions. It includes reevaluating how objects are collected, moved, displayed, labeled and interpreted. It aims to acknowledge and promote a wide range of perspectives and identities within the museum spaces, challenge language that may be exclusionary or biased, recognise and value the contributions of historically marginalised communities and peoples and to tell diverse stories.
Many collaborations enhance our understanding of the intricacies and nuances of global interconnections and enable us to foster a contemporary and forward-looking approach to our collections. This does not begin and end with restitution; it includes extensive processes of negotiation that take into account a range of different interests, diverse practices of knowledge acquisition, and global disparities.
The consensus that is reached with regard to each respective collaborative endeavour is shaped and supported in a spirit of commitment and mutual respect by everyone at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst. Together, the museum staff strives to make the collections and their history as transparent and accessible as possible and to share them with the general public.
One of the central components of the project “The Collaborative Museum” is a fellowship programme aiming at international artists, researchers, community representatives, and cultural workers. The programme offers grants for academic or artistic research projects that allow fellows the opportunity to critically examine the collections and their contexts of meaning through their work, to experiment with new research approaches, to develop interventions in the field of contemporary art, or to work together with curators and museums’ staff to inspire new impulses in transcultural museum work. Transparency and opening up new forms of access are key focuses of this work, as is ensuring the participation of a diversity of disciplines, individuals, cultural perspectives, and voices. The CoMuse Fellowship programme is particularly interested in supporting early-career academics and emerging artists in their professional development.
The Museum für Asiatische Kunst recognises the value of its holdings for the global community, especially the communities of origin. The so-called “objects” or “exhibits” cannot be reduced to mere things or artefacts but must be acknowledged as “cultural belongings”. They mediate relationships between people, places, and cultural and artistic practices related to the past, future, and present.
