So far, the Museum für Asiatische Kunst has presented its inventory as a historically closed chapter. Meanwhile, lively and complex debates on the artistic tradition are taking place in the contemporary art scenes of Asian countries themselves. An artist-in-residence program for young artists, who come from the regions where the old artifacts were collected, is an attempt to take this reality into account more. The first guest was the Pakistani artist Waseem Ahmed, a prominent representative of the socio-critical school of contemporary miniature painting. He spent seven weeks in Berlin-Dahlem, creating four new works in response to and in dialog with the museum’s collection. These were exhibited at the end of Ahmed’s residency along with some of Ahmed’s older works, together with old album pages from the museum that contained comparable motifs. An intensive workshop as well as open atelier hours allowed visitors to partake of the artistic process.

You can find a detailed description of the project here.