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

African Masters at the Museum Rietberg

African Masters. Art from the Ivory Coast is a major exhibition now on view at the Museum Rietberg in Zürich through June 1. Spanning 200 years of art and featuring some 200 masterpieces by around forty sculptors, this show is the first to examine African artists of different generations from six major art regions of West Africa and the works attributed to them. It refutes the still widespread view that traditional African art was almost devoid of aesthetic principles and that Africa had no proper artists, only anonymous sculptors working in tribal workshops. Visitors to this ambitious exhibition will be able to discover the great masters of the Guro, Baule, Dan, Senufo, Lobi and Lagoon peoples and admire their most famous works – sculptures and masks of intense power and beauty.

View the exhibition's official website.

Images courtesy of the Museum Rietberg

Chavín at the Museum Rietberg

On view at Zürich's Museum Rietberg until March 10 is Chavín, an exhibition exploring one of South America's most ancient known cultural centers. In the narrow valley of Callejón de Conchucos, behind the snow-covered mountains of the Cordillera Blanca in the Peruvian highlands, lie the ruins of the ceremonial complex of Chavín de Huántar. Erected at least 2,500 years before the Inca, the monumental temple would have involved vast expenditure and enormous labour. This exhibition features an array of marvelous Peruvian works excavated from the theatrically conceived ceremonial center, and unveils the worldview and system of meaning it sough to embody.

View the exhibition's official website.

Mortar for the preparation of psychoactive substances  -  900–550 BC

Stirrup-spout vessel depicting a transformation  -  1200–500 BC

Anthropomorphic head  -  900–550 BC

Mouth mask of a priest  -  800–550 BC

Information and images courtesy of the Museum Rietberg