The collection presentation Inspiring SWANA scheduled to open at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) on 4 July 2025 represents the final step in the reorganisation of the museum’s non European collections. With a critical eye to the museum’s own colonial heritage, this substantive reorientation has resulted in renaming the Islamic art collection the SWANA collection. SWANA stands for the region of Southwest Asia and North Africa. This new geographic description of the collection reflects a change of perspective that attempts to free the collection from Eurocentric attributions such as Islamic or oriental. The focus is on objects and their design traditions. Five galleries are being reconceived according to this approach and three new themed areas added. The aim is to present the historical collection in a more dynamic way and to realign it in a more topical manner with the help of partners from the SWANA region and its diaspora in Hamburg, among others.

Themes in Inspiring SWANA

The title Inspiring SWANA is in line with the previous new presentations Inspiring Japan (2023) and Inspiring China* (2024). The five exhibition galleries that were originally developed in 2015 for the permanent exhibition “Islam” will now focus on the themes of Diversity and interaction, Legacy and change, Faith and spirituality, Poetry and figuration and form and function. Tiles, ceramic vessels, metalwork, glass, textiles and calligraphy illustrate the design traditions of the ethnically and religiously diverse SWANA region. The pottery that forms a main focus of the collection demonstrates how artisanal traditions are interwoven across different cultures – both within the region and in exchanges with East Asia and Europe. Individual exhibits reveal the collection’s chronological links to both antiquity and the present day. Based on selected examples, a provenance trail traces how closely the development of the collection was tied to the colonisation of the SWANA region around 1900.

Three new themed areas open up a versatile space for encountering and exploring contemporary artworks, where many different voices can actively engage with art, crafts and design from the SWANA region. The theme of Geometry examines geometric patterns as dynamic unity with regional variations that are characteristic of SWANA applied arts. They come to the fore in particular in the design of doors, windows and tiles. Despite religious, linguistic, ethnic, political and social differences in the SWANA region, Arabic Script along with its Persian and Ottoman variations serves as a unifying element across national borders. On display will be historical and contemporary calligraphy and lettering design. For the theme of Remix, an open call will invite cooperation partners to contribute with artworks or scholarly studies on design from the SWANA region and its diaspora.

As part of the reorientation and opening up of the collection, a new event format has been trialled since September 2024: Majlis – Get together at MK&G invites people who feel connected to the SWANA region to exchange ideas on cultural, creative and social topics and work on them in workshops on the first Saturday of every month.