Headhunters' Paradise
A temporary exhibition at the Humboldt Forum on the practice of headhunting among the Naga, co-curated across cultures and built around the fluidity of the discussion itself.
Headhunting in Naga history is not a settled subject. For a generation of Naga whose elders practiced it, the topic sits between cultural memory and contemporary discomfort; for a Berlin ethnological institution presenting it to a European public, the curatorial risk is higher still.
Any exhibition that fixes the discussion in place — that arrives at a verdict — gets the subject wrong. The Stiftung Humboldt Forum needed a format that could hold the conversation without resolving it, and that could be co-owned by the people whose history it represents.
Curation was led by Zubeni Lotha from Nagaland and Dr. Roland Platz from the Ethnological Museum Berlin — an intercultural team rather than a single curatorial voice, which set the editorial logic for everything downstream. Two perspectives in the room meant the exhibition couldn't default to a single thesis; it had to make space for both.
Luxoom designed the exhibition as a multilayered presentation rather than a linear argument. Story, interviews, artefacts, video and image were treated as parallel sources rather than supporting evidence for a single throughline. Visitors moved through a snapshot of an ongoing discussion, with the layers visible as layers — the curatorial structure made part of the visitor's reading rather than hidden underneath it.
The design discipline was to stay temporary in tone. Nothing in the staging suggested permanence or institutional finality. The exhibition presented itself as a position taken at a particular moment, by particular people, on a subject that would continue to shift after the visitor left the room.
Headhunters' Paradise ran as part of the Humboldt Forum's final rehearsal stages programme before the building's full opening. Der Tagesspiegel named it among the six most unforgettable parts of that programme. The exhibition closed having produced what its co-curators set out to produce: a result the participating communities could identify with — measured not by attendance but by ownership.
Tell us about your project.
The first call is about understanding the question — not pitching the answer. Even if the brief is still loose.
hello@luxoom.com→