.jpg)
About
Humboldt Forum occupies one of Berlin's most historically resonant sites and stands among the city's most ambitious recent cultural undertakings. Rising on the grounds of the former Berlin Palace, the building reconstructs three of the palace's Baroque facades around a contemporary interior, a design by architect Franco Stella that was realised between 2013 and 2020, with the institution opening its doors to the public in stages from 2020 onward. This layering of historical form and new function reflects the site's long and varied history, one that reaches back through the Palace of the Republic of the GDR era to the Hohenzollern residence that preceded it, making the building itself a kind of archive of successive Berlin identities.
Rather than functioning as a single museum, Humboldt Forum was conceived as a broad cultural and scientific complex bringing several institutions under one roof. It houses the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Humboldt-Universität's Humboldt Labor, and the Stadtmuseum Berlin's exhibition BERLIN GLOBAL, alongside spaces dedicated to the building's own architectural and political history. This plurality of voices under a shared institutional roof is central to its identity and distinguishes it from a conventional single-collection museum.
Its contemporary importance lies substantially in the scale and nature of the ethnographic and Asian art collections it now presents to the public, among the most significant in Europe, and in the institution's active role in international conversations about the history, provenance and future of such collections. Humboldt Forum has positioned itself as a space for ongoing dialogue with countries and communities of origin, hosting international partners and convening formats such as the Global Cultural Assembly to discuss questions of shared heritage and collaborative curatorship.
Curatorially, the institution has moved toward collaborative and multi-perspectival approaches, developing exhibitions in partnership with international scholars, artists and communities connected to the collections on display, alongside changing contemporary art and design presentations that place historical objects in conversation with current artistic practice. This trajectory reflects a broader ambition to treat the museum as a forum in the fullest sense, a place for exchange rather than a fixed repository.
Organisationally, Humboldt Forum rests on the partnership between the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, which manages the building and its integrative programming, and the partner institutions that contribute their collections and expertise, namely the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Stadtmuseum Berlin. Its funding follows this same collaborative structure, drawing primarily on federal government support through the Bundesbeauftragte für Kultur und Medien, supplemented by the City of Berlin and private donations that contributed significantly to the palace facade reconstruction.
Taken together, Humboldt Forum represents a distinctive model of cultural institution, one built on plurality of content, collaborative governance and an explicit commitment to dialogue across historical and cultural distance.