Long Museum Night: Berlin's Cultures Unite!

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Berlin's par excellence cultural highlight of the year goes fully multicultural

August 18th, 2016

Daniel Erhardt, Berlin Global

Long Museum Night.jpg

Berlin’s Long Museum Night is the highlight showcasing the best that the city’s “temples of culture” have to offer. One night a year only, 77 of the city’s museums are open to the public from a different perspective. Through music performances, workshops and special guided tours, the ultimate celebration of Berlin’s cultures is set for discovery.

One ticket and 770 special events will fill the evening of Saturday, August 27th throughout the whole of Berlin. One ticket and almost countless options will guide visitors through a night of cultural rendez-vous. This year especially, the cultural diplomacy component is highlighted, as many of the performances, events and tours are targeted to discover and share cultural knowledge, traditions, tastes and sounds.

For instance, one of three guided tours on offer, “Spanien in Berlin” (“Spain in Berlin”) is centered around the discovery of Spanish culture. It will feature museum exhibitions related to Spanish art, literature and design; with a focus on the Spanish “Golden Age”, throughout the 17th century. Such as the “The Velázquez Era” exhibition of baroque paintings at the Gemäldegalerie in the Kulturforum.

Also in this venue, exhibitions and performances illustrating the life and work of Don Quixote’s literary creator, Miguel de Cervantes, and of contemporary fashion designer Balenciaga, will be visited within the Ibero-American Culture Institute. The tour will be completed by film projections and culinary degustation at the aforementioned institute and by a visit to the surrealist Dalí Museum on Potsdamer Platz.

From Spain to Italy, a guided tour describing the development of Majolica porcelain in these two countries will be featured at the Arts and Crafts Museum (Kunstgewerbemuseum). Another more exotic option is learning about children and youth in modern Japan through knitting figures of Japanese children-protecting divinities and learning to play the Japanese board game Sugoroku, among other activities, at the Mori Ogai Memorial Center.

African culture can be discovered through the visit of the exhibition “Dada-Afrika: Dialog Mit den Fremden” (“Dada-Africa: Dialogue with the Foreigners”) on Dadaist African art, at the Berlinische Galerie. Cultural exchange and dialogue will also stress the links with the Arab-speaking world. This is where the project “Multaka: Meeting Point Museum – Refugees as Guides in Berlin Museums” comes in.

They will offer tours of the Pergamon Museum in the Arabic language with Syrian and Iraqi refugees as hosts, spreading the discovery of the ancient common heritage shared in its collection. They will also become “Al-Hakawati” story-tellers of traditional fairytales from their homeland, for refugee children to discover them.

Among the musical performances, the one by the international music project 'Fattouch' stands out. Formed by musicians from Lebanon, France, Syria and Romania; it will bring together multicultural sounds from Europe and the Middle East to the front of the Museum for Islamic Art.

These being just a selection of cultural experiences, there is something for everyone's taste on offer; inviting all to indulge in the diversity of Berlin's culture in this midsummer night reality.

References:

See more at: http://www.berlinglobal.org/index.php?long-museum-night-berlins-cultures-unite

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