Traveler and guest: 'Musafir' unites two concepts

A wide range of languages have adopted some form of the Arabic word "musafir," including Romanian, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Swahili, Kazakh, Malay and Uyghur, among others, showing how the term has traveled all the way to East Asia in one direction, and through parts of Africa in the other.

Throughout these diverse cultural spaces, the term usually still refers to its original meaning, "traveler." But in some languages, such as Turkish and Romanian, it has come to mean "guest."

The intersection of these two ideas — seeing the traveler as a welcomed guest — has inspired a new exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

Titled "Musafiri: Of Travelers and Guests," the contemporary art show and research project revolves around questions of travel and hospitality: Throughout history, how were the world's travelers greeted by the people they encountered? What can we learn from different cultures' traditions and policies of hospitality towards visitors? And how can they inspire a modern, pluralistic world where travelers and migrants feel welcome?

These questions are timeless, "but it is rather urgent" to look into them today, "in a time when traveling is not an easy thing. In a time when we see the mounting of walls, of fortresses, of massive deportations, we must come back to these basic things," said the director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, at the press presentation of the exhibition. 

Lourenco da Silva Mendonca: a human rights pioneer

The research project accompanying the exhibition puts the spotlight on historical figures whose travels and notable achievements generally didn't make it into Western history books.

As noted by curator Cosmin Costinas, one such significant traveler was Lourenco da Silva Mendonca. The prince from the royal house of Ndongo (in present-day Angola) has been largely overlooked until only recently, even though he led a groundbreaking campaign to abolish slavery.

He was sent into exile to Brazil in 1671 as a political prisoner of war with his family, as they had rebelled against Portugal's imposition of a tax on slaves. He was later sent to Portugal and continued traveling, ending up in Italy, where he appealed to the Pope to officially denounce the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans. Mendonca won his case at the Vatican, leading Pope Innocent XI to condemn slavery in 1686.

Mendonca's plea for rights shared by all, "Jews, pagans or Christians on every land in the world," as he stated, made him a pioneer of human rights, which only became a central concern of European intellectuals a century later, during the Enlightenment era.

This historical figure resonates with some of the exhibition's works of art that explore stories of Black resistance and comment on how "modern capitalism, to a large extent, is grounded in the enslavement of African people in the Americas," says curator Cosmin Costinas.

Tackling a violent colonial past

Other works in the show tackle colonialism. For example, the series "Seamstress' Raffles" by Singapore-born artist Jimmy Ong comments on the legacy of British colonialist Stamford Raffles, who set up a trading post in Singapore that would lead the island to become a British colony in 1824. Though his name is still commemorated today through the country's streets and institutions, he is also regarded as a looter and invader.

Jimmy Ong reproduces parts of a famous statue of Raffles in his works. The dismembered, headless effigies are cut, sewn, dyed and hung from ropes — it's the artist's way to address the colonialist's violent role in history.

Between tradition and modernity

A centerpiece of the exhibition is an installation by Malaysian artist Anne Samat. In "Wide Awake and Unafraid," she integrates unconventional materials into a work featuring traditional Malaysian weaving.

"It's a huge anthropomorphic figure that demands attention, but the basic elements of the work are very basic, humble, everyday materials — garden rakes, sticks and yarns," she says, adding that this opposition between eccentricity and humility, between tradition and modernity, represents the cultural duality of Malaysia.

Cosmin Costinas also points out that many of the items in the installation are mass-produced, with "many of them lacking any magic or beauty when judged individually as themselves. This capacity to transform them and to mutate them into a completely different being speaks about the power of the artist, but also about the 'make-believe' magic that capitalism relies on in order to transform mountains of plastic into goods of desire."

The diversity of the 'musafir'

The exhibition, which features works by around 40 artists, also explores different cultural interconnections, such as how K-pop has contributed to reshaping global pop culture, or how the Brazilian lambada craze traveled around the world and topped international music charts in the 1990s.

The photo series by award-winning author Ocean Vuong portrays how Vietnamese refugees in the US established their own community spaces, creating along the way the nail-salon industry.

The range of journeys undertaken by the musafir are extremely diverse, as the exhibition shows. "Musafiri: Of Travelers and Guests" brings to the fore the people "rendered invisible in the 'underside' of globalization, namely those of migrant workers — the anonymous builders of infrastructure, the logistics workers," writes the curator in his introductory essay. 

At the same time, the exhibition also evokes the cases of those "who refuse travel as forms of resistance," as Costinas pointed out, of "the people who refuse to be deported from their homes, who refuse to be dislocated or ethnically cleansed from their ancestral lands." In some cases, these people see their homeland destroyed without even having to set foot abroad.

Edited by: Sarah Hucal