“Goodbye Mshatta”: Connections and Disconnections on Berlin's Museum Island

Abstract

AbstractThis essay is concerned with a contemporary art intervention in Berlin's Museum of Islamic Art, in the context of the Mshatta Façade's move. Sketching out Mshatta's relocation history, the essay highlights how the dynamic of connection and disconnection plays out in a museum setting and is embedded in epistemic concepts mobilized in knowledge-making about objects. Specifically, it focuses on an installation entitled “Goodbye Mschatta. Ich bin ein Fremder. Zweifach Fremder” (“Goodbye Mshatta. I Am a Stranger: Twofold a Stranger”), by a Syrian-born German visual artist who was commissioned to bid farewell to the Façade in its most recent location before it moves to the Pergamon Museum's north wing. Entering into a dialogue with Mshatta, his sculptural intervention pivoted around the themes of incompleteness, mélange, and in-betweenness. It revealed multiple connections and disconnections with regard to the Façade’s biography, while ostensibly disengaging from the debate on historical justice and imperial legacies.