Dance of the Ancestors: Art from the Sepik of Papua New Guinea

In its last days at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich is Dance of the Ancestors: Art from the Sepik of Papua New Guinea, an exhibition focusing on the many tribes of the Sepik River in northern Papua New Guinea. Philippe Peltier of the Musée du Quai Branly and Markus Schindlbeck of the Berlin Ethnologisches Museum, the exhibition’s curators, have assembled 220 objects, all from European museums and for the most part collected prior to World War I, with the intention of making the show more than just an art exhibition, but a tribute to the wealth and diversity of these cultures, as well as a key for understanding their lifestyles and their complex social organization.

Visit the Museum Rietberg website.

Kosmos - Rätsel der Menschheit

The great timekeepers of our earthly existence are the celestial bodies surrounding us, especially the moon and sun. Humans have been trying to explain them and decipher them for thousands of years. What is the universe, the ordering principle underlying the firmament? Kosmos - Rätsel der Menschheit (The Cosmos - Mystery of Mankind), now on view at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich, explores the great enigma that is the universe. Alongside cosmologies and creation myths from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Polynesia, those of the western world from Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Germanic peoples and the Biblical account in Genesis will also be presented, as well the history of European scientific inquiry. Based on the exhibition idea by Martin Brauen and his exhibition Visions of the Cosmos, which was shown at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York in 2009.

Visit the exhibition's official website.

Images courtesy of the Museum Rietberg