The Power of Culture

How can museums from the South prevent putting more energy in contacts with western museums than with their own environment? Young museum professionals from Africa, Asia and Latin-America on May 15 and 16, 2008 joined their Dutch counterparts in order to discuss this issue and others.

A Curiosity Manifesto and improved cooperation between the organisations were the results of the Unlimited Curiosity symposium held on 31 March 2008.

Culture for Development is one of the new portals on the KIT website. This English portal gives access to a wide variety of documents, newsletters, electronic magazines, discussion groups and other internet sources in the area of culture in or related to developing countries.

This exhibition presents objects collected by the Tropenmuseum from Africa south of the Sahara: an enormous area of tremendous cultural diversity and richness.

The idea of letting African youth write their own film scripts to provide information about AIDS was born in 1997. Since then, 105,000 young Africans from 37 countries have participated in scenario contests.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 enabled fruit seller Khosrow Hassanzadeh to become an artist: the chaos created new opportunities. His compelling work, created since the 1980s, contains elements from the art of Japanese prints, the French Nabis artists, art nouveau and Andy Warhol.

The Tropenmuseum recently gave 45 pieces of art to the Surinaams Museum. The collection consists of paintings, sculptures, photographs and silkscreen prints by renowned Surinam artists.