Guided Tours

Guided tour with Lilla Russell-Smith, meeting point: 3rd floor

Throughout history, people have created objects to which they attributed superhuman powers. Depictions of goddesses, demons, queens, and others helped them overcome personal or collective crises. Over thousands of years and across continents, this gave rise to a creative diversity that continues to fascinate us to this day.

Guided tour with Mira Dallige-Smith, meeting point: 3rd floor

Conservation is a fascinating but often hidden professional field in museums. What is preserved and how, and who makes the decisions? This guided tour sheds light on various aspects of this important work.

Guided tour with Uta Rahman Steinert and Mirae kh Rhee, meeting point: 3rd floor

Mirae Kate-Hers Rhee is an interdisciplinary, research-based artist working in Berlin, California, and South Korea. In her artistic practice, she explores diasporic identity, forced migration, and cultural reckoning through performance, installation, and the transformation of traditional materials. The current presentation is part of a long-term project that examines the concept of cabinets of curiosities from the perspective of transnational feminism and decolonial approaches.

Guided tour with Ute Marxreiter and Kerstin Pinther, meeting point: 3rd floor

The exhibition showcases female artists from Canada, South Korea, Nigeria, Ghana, Myanmar, Germany, Estonia, Uzbekistan and the USA. Working across a range of media—including photography, spatial and video installations, drawing, painting, fashion, jewellery and ceramics—they explore the theme of belonging beyond blood ties or state-sanctioned images of the family.

Guided tour with Ute Schüren, meeting point: F, 2nd floor

One of the most striking objects in the Ethnological Museum is the “Lienzo Seler II / Coixtlahuaca II”—a cotton cloth measuring approximately 16 square meters that dates from the 16th century. Speakers of Mixtec, Nahuatl, and Cocho created the painted cloth with written inscriptions in the Coixtlahuaca Valley, in what is now the state of Oaxaca in Mexico. In doing so, they recorded social events spanning a period of more than 500 years, extending into the early Spanish colonial period after 1521.

Guided tour with Patrick Helber and Christian Hajer, meeting point: F, 2nd floor

On display are historical photographs by the avant-garde photographer Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon), who in her works staged the style of the “New Woman” of the Weimar Republic alongside objects from colonial contexts. Helber and Hajer discuss contemporary perspectives on the works and situate them within the intertwined history of colonialism and the Holocaust in the ethnological collections.