The Toraja rice granary
Seven and a half metres of carved wood.
No. The combined ticket also admits you to the Schnuetgen museum of medieval art, which shares the same entrance and is displayed inside the Romanesque church of St Cecilia. Half an hour more gives you a direct comparison between medieval European religious art and everything you have just seen in the rooms next door.
Largely yes: the galleries hold big, colourful things and hands-on stations, and the rice granary alone impresses small visitors. The section on death and funerary ritual, though, shows coffins and masks that can unsettle younger children, and it is easy enough to walk past if you prefer.
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Cologne's museum of world cultures grew out of a collection assembled by Wilhelm Joest, a Cologne traveller who died on a voyage in eighteen ninety-seven; his sister Adele Rautenstrauch gave it to the city. The holdings now run to some sixty-five thousand objects, and in twenty ten they moved into a new building in the cultural quarter at Neumarkt that shares its entrance with the Schnuetgen museum of medieval art. The arrangement is what sets it apart. The permanent display is organised not by continent but by shared questions — dwelling, clothing, adornment, death, ritual — so a West African object stands beside a European one answering the same need. The intention is that the European visitor is inside the display rather than outside looking in, and the approach won the museum the Council of Europe Museum Prize in twenty twelve. Its landmark object is a rice granary of the Toraja people from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, seven and a half metres tall and carved over every surface, with a fifty-instrument gamelan orchestra nearby. The museum states openly that part of its collection arrived in a colonial context, and puts its provenance research and restitution work on show; that argument has itself become part of the visit.
Seven and a half metres of carved wood.
Continents side by side on one question.
Caecilienstrasse 29-33, 50676 Cologne