Young Scholars' Talk

Objects in Motion: Collecting India for Berlin’s Museums

Talk by

Habiba Insaf

(Art Historian & Research Associate at the Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation at Humboldt University, Berlin)

About the Talk

This talk examines the complex trajectories through which objects from the Indian subcontinent entered and circulated within Berlin’s state museums. Focusing on acquisition practices, the talk explores the dense transnational networks that enabled collecting across the subcontinent. These pathways complicate assumptions of a marginal and indirect German engagement with the so-called Orient, instead revealing extensive collaboration, dependence, and competition within European imperial circuits of travel, collecting, and knowledge production. While resisting reductive narratives of universal plunder, it acknowledges the ethical ambiguities of these collecting processes and attends to multiple modes of acquisition, including coercive, negotiated, and collaborative practices under conditions of imperial inequality.

About the Speaker

Habiba Insaf is a research associate at the Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation at Humboldt University, Berlin. Her doctoral research examined the politics of display and interpretation of Indian objects in the Berlin State Museums. She earned her Master's in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Her decade-long professional work spans the domains of art history, museum education and museum studies. She has also curated museum walks centred on themes such as love, gender and aesthetics as a part of heritage festivals. She has written, among other things, articles on popular culture, museums and decolonisation. She is a recipient of the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s PhD Scholarship, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s German Chancellor Fellowship, the Singapore International Foundation’s Arts for Good Fellowship and the Prince Claus Fund.

Date: 5 March, 2026 (Thursday)

Time: 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM

For ages: 18 and above

Venue: Lecture Hall, L D Museum

For registration, please contact:

Call: +91-9408536883 | WhatsApp: +91-7863040584

Image: View of the Hindu Art Gallery at the Humboldt Forum. © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss / Alexander Schippel