The Yale Peabody Museum is reopening early next year after four years of renovations.
Celebrated Syrian-American artist and architect Mohamad Hafez just installed a new piece, titled “Eternal Cities,” alongside the museum’s Babylonian collection. 3D-printed replicas of ancient Babylonian artifacts are peppered throughout the piece, bridging the millennia between ancient Mesopotamia and present-day Syria.
"It's a collaboration between educational archaeological museums, and local artists that come from the region that are working and living in the diaspora," says Hafez, "and at the crux of it, it solves a problem of engaging people in a very short attention span times, getting more interest built into these objects beyond just looking at them in a glass vitrine."
This hour, Mohamad joins us along with two of the museum’s curators. The new Peabody aims to position itself as a more community-centered space in New Haven. How can museums include the local communities they serve?
Hafez reflects, "This collaboration becomes such a fundamental win-win situation, for the institutions that have now discovered a way to explore and feature their arsenal of beautiful objects in an unorthodox way; and the local Middle Eastern artists that are also reexamining these objects and reintroducing them in an also unorthodox way... I hope to God that we see a lot more and more collaborations like this from all over the world, to engage so many artists and open up these archives to them."
GUESTS:
- Mohamad Hafez: Artist and Architect
- Kailen Rogers: Associate Director of Exhibitions, Yale Peabody Museum
- Agnete Lassen: Associate Curator, Yale Babylonian Collection
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