Museum der Kulturen, Basel

Swiss museums and galleries have been open to the public since the beginning of March, and it‘s fair to say that Basel has some of the country’s best museums to visit. I recently visited the Museum der Kulturen, tucked away in a corner of the Münsterplatz in the Altstadt and a place that has quickly become one of my firm favourites. 

As a trained anthropologist and someone who has spent over a decade working on museums and exhibitions of non-Western cultures, I was surprised that it took me three years to step foot in this gem. Designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, the largest Swiss anthropological museum‘s four floors host regularly rotating exhibitions and the museum‘s permanent collections, like masks and other objects relating to the UNESCO recognized Basler Fasnacht. 

The top floor currently houses the exhibition Enlightened: the Realm of the Buddhas, on display until early 2022. The exhibition focuses on the Three Jewels of Buddhism (the Buddha, his teachings, and the Buddhist community). Beautiful objects from Buddhist communities throughout Asia are displayed alongside contemporary artworks — there‘s even a quiet corner that invites visitors and school groups to practice traditional Buddhist meditation. 

 

The third floor is home to Memory: Moments of Remembering and Forgetting.

Four hundred objects from the MdK‘s collections explore ideas of memory making (and forgetting) in cultures throughout the world. There‘s souvenir knick-knacks ... 

... aboriginal art ... 

... colourfully painted Indian textiles ... 

... East and Southern African kanga cloths, and Western religious symbolism.

The next floor down is dedicated to the sizes of things (mostly large) and the ways of measuring largeness in the exhibition BIG. (This exhibition actually shut in early April.)

A hand-held ‚map‘ helps Pacific Islanders navigate the swells, tides, wind changes, and small islands of the vast ocean.

Larger than life statues juxtaposed with mini-figurines.

A extended piece of barkcloth that literally took over nearly the entirety of one room!

Large fishes and vessels ... and a mask! (That requires more than one person to balance and operate it, thank goodness.)

The first floor is where the newly opened Making the World exhibition is located. The Museum partnered with the Kunstmuseum Basel to explore the themes of origins, myths of creations, how humans have made worlds they inhabit. There are displays related to this theme in both galleries, so I‘m looking forward to my next visit to the Kunstmuseum to check out their iteration.

The Museum der Kulturen can easily be interpreted as an „ethnographic“ museum, or an institution that houses non-Western arts and artefacts — and thankfully, it is not. The displays are thoughtfully curated and beautifully displayed, with the idea that cultures that produce the objects on display as dynamic, changing, and literally interacting with objects from around Switzerland and Europe. Instead, the museum plays with big themes that are relevant to all of our lives around the globe and explores how different material cultures have interpreted them. Works of Western fine art meet non-Western objects meet contemporary installations.

My one critique is that the majority of the text and labels inside the physical exhibitions are only in German, which I found unusual, as Basel borders both Germany and France and has cross-border visitors. I suppose I‘m used to museum practice in Canton Bern, an officially dual-language canton, where it is common to have exhibit texts in German, English, and French. However, the exhibition texts and descriptions in English and French are easily found on the Museum‘s website. 

The Museum der Kulturen is located in Basel‘s old city, a stone‘s throw away from the cathedral on Munsterplatz. It‘s closed on Mondays and admission is 16 CHF for adults (though I got in free with my Swiss Museums Pass).