A Bittersweet Goodbye from the Vorderasiatisches Museum … for now

Curator Pınar Durgun and curatorial assistant Giulia Russo were there live when the Pergamon Museum said goodbye to the Berliners until further notice. What will happen next and in which direction do the museum professionals from the Museum of the Ancient Near East want to develop their museum in the future?

Text: Pınar Durgun & Giulia Russo

(deutsche Version)

On October 22, 2023, the Pergamon Museum opened its doors to visitors for the last time. When the imminent closure of the Vorderasiatisches Museum was announced in spring 2023 for renovation work until 2037, long queues formed at the entrance. The museum sold out every day, people wanted to take one last look at the Mesopotamian antiquities and the famous Ishtar Gate. Many were surprised, some were shocked: is 2037 perhaps (hopefully) a typo? What will happen here in the next 14 years – and what will happen to the exhibits? How would the closure of the museum affect research on the artifacts stored there?

But work at the Vorderasiatisches Museum has been continuing without interruption since October 23, when we started moving the archaeological objects from the galleries to the storage depots (Fig.1). The beginning of 2024 marked the completion of the move of the smaller objects in the display cases. The larger and heavier objects will continue to be moved until the end of 2024. Currently, both internal and external conservators and restorers are carrying out the necessary conservation work on the artifacts, architecture, and paintings (Fig.2). The museum will, of course, continue to grant access to researchers and students to study the objects in the collection depending on their conservation state. To enhance accessibility, the Vorderasiatisches Museum is preparing an online exhibition, supported by the ongoing digitization of the collections. The special exhibitions in the making will also provide new contexts for the objects. The concept for the new permanent exhibition of the Vorderasiatisches Museum, which is due to reopen in 14 years´ time, is also being formed. 

All this future work needs to be grounded in what we have learned from the past and present of the history of the Vorderasiatisches Museum. One important element of future exhibits will be the focus on local Berlin communities, social issues concerning Berliners, as well as global concerns and our shared futures. In the summer months before closing, the museum bid farewell to visitors with a series of unique and free evening events that hoped to foreshadow the kinds of ideas we would like to bring forward in the future new permanent exhibits. In formats never before experimented within the Pergamon Museum, we opened up the museum space to local artists and performers and collaboratively curated several unforgettable events.

GATE: Between Babylon and Berlin

To kick off the event series, we invited Aya Labanieh (Columbia University and Metropolitan Museum of Art New York) and Sophus Helle (Freie Universität Berlin) to curate the poetry evening GATE: Between Babylon and Berlin on August 23, 2023. Poets Ghareeb Iskander, Abdulkadir Musa, Widad Nabi and Liwaa Yazji and musician Emrah Gökmen reflected on their personal experiences of exile, movement and longing in a dialog with the Babylonian past. They celebrated the connections between modern migrants and ancient artifacts and remembered the journeys they all had to make under different circumstances. Poems and songs in Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish, translated into English and German, created an emotional bond between history, heritage, nostalgia, and belonging (Fig.3).

The Ishtar Gate of Babylon provided the perfect background for this event. The Gate was built in Babylon under king Nebuchadnezzar II, who had achieved wealth and fame through his office of kingship, as well his conquest of lands. Originally marking one entrance to Babylon, 2500 years after its construction the Ishtar Gate now stands in Berlin. Babylon and Berlin are very closely connected. Both cities share a similarly turbulent history from an imperial capital to a modern city in ruins after war, destruction, and loss. Both metropolises are famous melting pots of their time, where people of different origins, languages, and lifestyles meet and live together. Before the First World War, the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft (DOG) excavated the fragments of the glazed bricks of the Ishtar Gate in Babylon, while Iraq was still under the Ottoman Empire and the Germans worked under the Prussian Empire.

Rediscovering a monument to movement

In the late 1920s, following an agreement between the Weimar Republic and the British Mandate of Iraq and the Ottoman empires, some of these fragments were shipped to Berlin. There, they were carefully reassembled to build the famous reconstruction in the Pergamon Museum. However, only around 20% of the architecture is made of the original fragments (namely the animal and floral representations) and the rest was made of modern bricks produced in a Berlin workshop. The Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum is thus a reconstruction that represents both a continuation of the ancient gate from the 6th century BCE and something completely new. The movement of fragments and their careful reassembly is reminiscent of the movements of people who are forced by war, poverty, persecution, or opportunity, and who reassemble and reinvent themselves in new identities and new contexts.

In the words of Aya Labanieh, GATE: Between Babylon and Berlin aimed to “rediscover the Ishtar Gate as a monument of movement, a cultural heritage that has a special meaning for modern migrants.” The event was a unique opportunity to make visitors with diverse migration and diaspora backgrounds feel welcome in the museum space. For us curators, it was unforgettable to hear Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish, languages we tried to make more visible in the exhibits echo in the presence of the monumental Ishtar Gate. For many of the participants it was a bittersweet moment to think about home while being far away from it. Considering the emotional response, the enthusiasm during the evening, and the fact that tickets sold out within a few days, we hope to create more space and opportunities for modern artists to interact and engage with ancient objects and monuments in the future VAM exhibits through their art and artistic expressions. 

Disrupting Time – Queens against Borders x Pergamon Museum

Disrupting Time – Queens against Borders x Pergamon Museum on September 30, 2023 was the second public event in the farewell program of the VAM. The Queens against Borders is an art collective of Trans and Queer artists from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) who now live in Berlin. By inviting the Queens, the museum wanted to open up the exhibition to people who have been excluded from the historical narrative of the past, thereby also addressing issues of queerness and their (in)visibility in museum spaces. The cultural and social history of ancient western Asia has much more room for queer concepts than is apparent at first glance. In ancient Mesopotamia, gender was anything but binary. The romantic friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the oldest epic ever written down makes us think about the different expressions of identity, gender, and love. The goddess Ishtar herself was ascribed masculine and feminine qualities such as war, sex, destruction, transformation, and love. She was able to transform the masculine into the feminine (and vice versa), and some of her priests and priestesses had non-binary identities.

Inspired by the antiquities on display in the VAM, the Queens wandered through the exhibition galleries with the participants of the event, accompanied by music and dance. The event began with Maria Asskaf and her belly dance to the drumbeat of Syrian percussionist Havo in front of the wall reliefs and lions of the Zincirli citadel gate. The Processional Street of Babylon provided the setting for the dabke folklore dance by the 1001 Nights Berlin ensemble, who combine traditional and modern Arabic dance styles. Afterwards, musician and composer Cham Saloum played her oud, an Arabic lute, in front of the wall reliefs from Nineveh depicting musicians accompanying a military parade. The Hellenistic Period terracotta figurines draped in elaborately layered clothing and the glazed brick reliefs of Achaemenid soldiers in their colorful robes from the palace of Darius I in Susa inspired Iman Asadi, a Greek-Egyptian Trans woman, to celebrate her passion for fashion and the ancient world on a catwalk through the Achaemenid and Babylonian rooms which included Hellenistic terracotta figurines with various clothing.

Inclusion, collaboration and community

She was followed by singer Wizzy from Syria with an emotional song, accompanied by Libyan drag artist Keil Li Divõn, who gave a performance on the theme of displacement and refuge against the backdrop of the Karaindash façade in the Uruk gallery. Their theatrical performance nodded to the story of Gilgamesh rejecting Ishtar, as king Gilgamesh was from the city of Uruk. Afterwards, all the artists gathered again in the Processional Street of Babylon and then led the visitors to the Ishtar Gate as a modern day procession. There, the grand finale of the event took place: The Darvish, Jouana Samia, and Anthony Nakhle, all well-known Berlin artists, danced in front of the Mushusshu and the bulls, sacred to gods Marduk and Adad respectively. At the end of the event, the Queens invited the participant guests to join them for a communal dance in front of the Ishtar Gate, underlining the importance of inclusion, collaboration, and community in museums (Fig.4). With their show, the Queens interrupted and questioned the linear presentation of historical narrative in the museum. Their interactive performances and powerful testimonies opened up a new dialog between people and antiquities, the past and the present. 

“The artists of Queens against Borders boldly and freely break with convention and celebrate the diversity and queerness of the SWANA region in places where we would not traditionally have been expected,” says the Syrian activist, dancer and curator of the event, The Darvish (Fig. 5). They see their personal goal as shifting the boundaries of social norms through vibrant and transgressive art. Over the years, Queens against Borders has become a platform where the stories of displaced people can find a voice. “In the context of contemporary art and the colonialism debate, the combination of displacement and queer expression is a powerful testament to human resilience and resistance”, continues The Darvish. This extraordinary event will hopefully inspire similar engagements with the VAM collection in the future.

A final thought

Every single object in the VAM tells a story: the story of the people who made and used it, the story of the people who excavated it, and the story of those who ultimately exhibit the objects in the museum. And that’s not all. The story continues with the people who see the objects, explore them, are inspired by them and give them a new meaning, ultimately making them part of their own personal history. 

The closure gives us not only the opportunity to reflect on how we, as the Vorderasiatisches Museum, can better present stories about the objects to visitors in the future, but also the chance  to reassess our practices, goals, and priorities. We have started imagining and discussing how a museum about ancient west Asia in Berlin will be relevant to local communities and visitors fourteen years from now and what social issues will be at the forefront of our lives and museum practice.  The closure events and the support we received from our public were encouraging examples in showcasing what collaboration between the museum and local communities, activists, artists, cultural workers, and academics might look like. During the closure of the museum building, we want to offer similar events and educational programs to expand and strengthen our networks with diverse communities and visitors of the museum. Collaborative community work means taking feedback and we look forward to integrating this feedback into the design and narrative of the future permanent exhibitions. The museum doors will be closed for now, but our ears, eyes, and mailboxes will be open to any feedback from you. What should the VAM look like when it reopens, what stories should it tell? We hope to hear from you soon…

As the Vorderasiatisches Museum, we would like to thank Museum & Location of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin for generously funding GATE: Between Babylon and Berlin and Disrupting Time – Queens against Borders x Pergamon Museum. Special thanks to all the artists, performers, and our community curators; the Darvish, Aya Labanieh, and Sophus Helle. We thank Studio M for their assistance. We acknowledge all the work that our museum and security staff put into the event.