A Brief History of Collapses

Mariam Ghani’s video traces the parallel histories of two distinguished buildings—the Museum Fridericianum built by Simon Louis du Ry in Kassel, Germany, in 1779, and the Darul Aman Palace built by Walter Harten in Kabul in 1929—examining their discrete ideological associations. In spite of the buildings’ divergent locations and sociopolitical contexts, they remain united by various similarities of structural detail informed by German neoclassicism. The Darul Aman Palace, which was emblematic of King Amanullah Khan’s plans for the country’s modernization and originally earmarked as the seat of its future parliament, is now a ruin. By contrast, its German counterpart, the first public museum in Europe, was restored in the early 1980s and now presents exhibitions of contemporary art.