Of Interest to the General Public by Maaza Mengiste
{{ time.start_TS | TS2dateFormat('MMM') }}
{{ time.start_TS | TS2dateFormat('YYYY') }}
| 12 EUR / 6 EUR reduced |
| Tickets can be booked online or at the box office in the foyer. |
| English |
| Mechanical Arena in the Foyer |
| Part of: Objects talk back |
1868, Ethiopia: the British Napier expedition, the burning and looting of Magdala. A German collector. A young Ethiopian boy. A stunning royal Ethiopian mantle. Maaza Mengiste reimagines their journeys – out of battle, through fire, over mountains to cross the waters into Berlin. The story of a name remembered, a life revived, a secret unveiled.
“Every object holds the story of a disappearance. Every disappearance carries the story of a human.” From this insight, Maaza Mengiste’s extraordinary new work for Objects Talk Back unfurls a series of heart-stopping questions:
What is an object? What is a human?
Who decides what is an object?
What is of interest to the general public?
Who is the public?
Of Interest to the General Public is a multi-media work informed by the history of the 1868 Napier expedition and the archives of Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. Like all Mengiste’s work, it unfolds at the intersections of the dead and the living, of literature and photography, of official history, hidden records and silenced testimony.
Maaza Mengiste, Ethiopian writer and photographer, who currently lives in New York, came to explore the African collections on display at the Humboldt Forum and ended up intrigued by an object hidden in the depot, a name erased from the records, a possibility refuted in the museum. With Of Interest to the General Public, now published as a book, Mengiste invites us into a space of astonishing encounters, rich, glimmering and unforgettable as the gold silver threads of the mantle.
The event will include a short screening and reading by Maaza Mengiste, then a conversation with curator Priya Basil, and audience questions followed by book signing.
Participants
Maaza Mengiste is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. She is the author of the novel, The Shadow King, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. It was named best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. Her story, “Dust, Ash, Flight,” which appeared in Addis Ababa Noir, edited by Maaza, was awarded a 2021 Edgar Award for Best Short Story.
She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship, a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, the Premio von Rezzori, the Premio il ponte, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Creative Capital Award. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, the Guardian, The New York Times, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and BBC, among other places.
She has taught at New York University, Princeton University, Northwestern University, and Queens College/CUNY, and Professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is currently working on her new novel as a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.
Priya Basil is an author, and curator of the Humboldt Forum project Objects Talk Back. In her book Be My Guest/Gastfreundschaft (2019), she combines memoir, philosophy, food and politics in a reflection on hospitality in the broadest sense. Her most recent book Locked In and Out (2025) explores memory-culture and belonging in Germany.
Priya is co-founder and board member of WIR MACHEN DAS, an NGO that works with refugees and migrants for a more inclusive society. She is also a member of the advisory board of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. She has conceptualized and curated projects for various institutions including the Goethe Institut and International Literature Festival Berlin. From 2021 to 2023 Priya was International Writer in Residence for Mindscapes, a project of the Wellcome Trust UK, devoted to transforming how we understand, talk about and treat mental health. As part of this Priya undertook a research journey which spanned six continents to learn about different understandings of well being and practices of healing. In 2024, Priya was Writer in Residence for Canopy, Wellcome’s Climate and Health project. She is working on a new book which draws on her research and travels. In 2025/26 Priya is a fellow of the The Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation Käte Hamburger Kolleg based at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
www.priyabasil.com
www.authorsforpeace.com