Yasmin Afshar thinks art is particularly fascinating because it doesn't require any specific language.

Everyone could understand them.

Their language is universal, says Afschar: "Art enables access through experience and sensual experiences." How art can open up new perspectives, how knowledge and perception are conveyed and function, and that humans can no longer be the measure of all things , she wants to investigate in Mainz.

Catherine Deschka

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

Afschar will take over the management of the Kunsthalle for a little over a year - replacing director Stefanie Böttcher, who went on parental leave until the end of March 2024.

Giving the management of a museum or exhibition center to someone else temporarily for this reason is a solution that is still extremely rarely practiced.

In any case, for Afshar, it opens up the opportunity to lead an institution that she appreciates.

From her home in Switzerland, Afschar keeps a close eye on the exhibition business in Germany.

The Kunsthalle was therefore also familiar to her: in addition to the clear profile of the Mainz institution with a focus on international contemporary art, she appreciates its openness and willingness to experiment.

Daring is part of the program.

Small, flexible team

Afschar herself had to take risks when she only found out at the end of October that she was going to Mainz.

That was little time to set up a program.

But she was given complete freedom, and thanks to a small, flexible team of five that allows for spontaneity, she was able to develop a concept that, with four exhibitions, is intended to bring current international art to the state capital as usual.

And yet it also opens up other, new perspectives.

That's what her view "from the outside" means, says Afschar, who was born in Tehran in 1985 as the daughter of a Swiss mother and an Iranian father, came to Vienna at the age of eight, grew up in Winterthur, art history, Persian literature and European ethnology in Zurich and She studied in Berlin, where she worked in the studio of Katharina Grosse and still finds it stimulating to have gotten to know the way an artist sees things and works.

When she lived as a resident in Hong Kong last winter, she also visited artists in their studios, without directly connecting it to exhibition plans.

A freedom that I really liked.

She returned to Zurich as a freelance curator.

As a mediator, she is committed to the international initiative "New Clients" to ensure that public art projects are awarded on behalf of citizens - it should not be L'art pour l'art, but art that has a function.

The exhibition "Amaze Me" curated by her about the Swiss artist Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) is currently on view at the Muzeum Susch in the canton of Graubünden.

Afschar worked at the Aargauer Kunsthaus from 2013 to 2021, where she most recently curated the exhibition on the Aargau researcher, naturopath and artist Emma Kunz (1892-1963).

In a dialogue with contemporary art, drawings by Kunz that she had used decades ago to help people heal could be seen.