A NEW STORY. Photographs by Isabel Muñoz | National Museum of Anthropology
Exhibitions
Isabel Muñoz, one of the greatest photographers of our time, visits MNA again after "Women of the Congo" (2017). Now he presents his latest major project that gives us insight into the profound anthropological values of the formation of Neolithic societies through his impressive photographs of four archaeological sites in Anatolia: Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, Nevalichori and Seburç. In recent years, the excavations of these "sanctuaries" have not ceased to surprise us, the discoveries of which are changing our knowledge of societies in transition between nomadism and sedentarism: their chronology, their organization and way of life, their megalithic architecture, their artistic expressions and their concept of the "sacred".
This exhibition kicks off a special program for the 150th anniversary of the National Museum of Anthropology (1875-2025), thus evoking the very first stages of its life, in which it was also a prehistoric museum. In fact, the project now links the MNA with three major museums dedicated to the dawn of man: the Pera Museum in Istanbul and the Museum of Civilization in Ankara, where it began, and the National Museum of Altamira, where it will stop next spring. The Altamira Museum was then the destination of most of the MNA's prehistoric collection, since part of the objects, mainly stone tools collected throughout the 19th century in different archaeological "sites", came from Cantabria.
In this way, the exhibition, while opening a phase of renovation of the museum, also closes a kind of "magic circle". The powerful images created by Isabel Muñoz are meant to look back to the distant past, but they challenge us from the most palpitating contemporaneity and connect us to questions that are still very valid. Humanity has travelled a path since then, are we really fundamentally different from the people who created and used those sacred spaces 9,000 years ago? Have we not forgotten the fundamental things that these people knew and felt about our relationship with the universe? Is it possible to rediscover those fundamental identities that have been lost by establishing a connection with the invisible dimension of these creations mediated by Isabel Muñoz? There is only one way to examine it...