Easy Read
Aslı Çavuşoğlu, the book the story of Agathange, a vision from St Gregory the Enlightened (2015). Courtesy of collection LAURASAR
Of Travellers and Guests
Musafir is an Arabic word.
Musafir means traveller.
Many other languages also use the word musafir:
Romanian, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Kazakh, Uyghur.
Those languages are spoken in these countries:
Romania
Turkey
Iran
Afghanistan
Pakistan
India
Tanzania
Kenya
Democratic Republic of Congo
Uganda
Burundi
Rwanda
Mozambique
Somalia
Oman
Kazakhstan
China
In many languages, musafir does not only mean traveller.
Musafir also means guest.
A musafir can also be a guest in someone’s home.
The title of our exhibition is Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests.
We want to show that travellers be welcomed as guests.
Our Visitors can also go on journeys in our exhibition.
They can see works of art from different countries.
Our exhibition also deals with a difficult topic:
travellers who are not received as guests.
We ask the questions:
Who is welcome and who is not?
Who decides which travellers are welcome and which are not?
In Germany, there are many discussions about whether people from other countries are welcome or not.
So, we want to explain a little about the history of travel.
People have been travelling for many years.
They set out on quests.
They wanted to develop themselves personally:
For example, they wanted to learn about other cultures and about themselves.
They wrote this knowledge down.
This meant they could share this knowledge with people at home.
However, many travellers did not want to travel.
People forced them to leave their homes and their country.
Travelling is not the right word for this.
It is abduction.
They were forced into slavery in the other countries.
Even today, millions of people leave their homes to work elsewhere.
They come from places like India, China and Indonesia.
They are called migrant workers.
They work as carers in old people's homes.
They are important for people in their new homeland:
there are often not enough workers there.
The works of our exhibition also show people in the travel industry.
Many people from the Philippines work on ships on the world's oceans.
Finally, our exhibition is also about people who have gone to war for foreign countries.
This happened in World War II, from 1939 to 1945.
It still happens today.
Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022.
A conflict between Russia and Ukraine had already existed long before that.
People from Nepal have been made to fight for Russia against Ukraine.
In our exhibition, we want to ask these important questions:
Do travellers always remain travellers?
Do they always remain strangers?
Or will they become guests?
Can they eventually be at home in their new country?