Interview Fourteen
name: label: Collection Creator
content: Esfandiari, Aziz
setName: label: See more items in
content: National Museum of Afghanistan Oral Histories
unitdate: label: Date
content: June 18, 2024
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives
identifier: label: Identifier
content: FSA.A2024.03, File 14
objectType: label: Type
content: Archival materials
scopecontent: label: Scope and Contents
content: This session focuses on the exhibitions of the National Museum of Afghanistan during the tenure of Omara Khan Masoudi as director, 2001-2015. Mr. Masoudi tells how the focus of the museum shifted to exhibitions after the reconstruction of the museum in 2004. The first exhibition put up in 2004 was the Nuristan artifacts exhibition which focused on large wooden objects. The museum also reopened with a photography exhibition of the covered bazaar of Tashqurghan, or Khulm. Then a photography exhibition featuring the Bactrian Treasure artifacts in collaboration with the French Embassy. 

Each year, a new exhibition was created by the museum. In 2011, the Mes Anyak exhibition put to use display cases from Japan and the Netherlands and produced the first research monograph for the museum. In 2012, an exhibition of Buddhist era artifacts from across Afghanistan was organized. In 2013, an exhibition of Islamic era art, including artifacts from the Ghaznavid, Ghurid, and Timurid periods and a partnership with Turquoise Mountain. In 2014, an exhibition opened called 'A Thousand Cities', focused on the civilization of Balkh. This exhibition featured a half hour film by National Geographic on the Bactrian Treasure.

Mr. Masoudi also discusses the exhibition history of the Bactrian Treasure going back to 1981; an initiative called 'Pictures Speak'; that most of the museum's visitors were young people; the origins of the international traveling exhibition of the Bactrian Treasure and National Geographic support; a 2005 agreement between Hamid Karzai and Jacques Chirac to exhibit the Bactrian Treasure at the Guimet Museum in Paris; the exhibition then travelled to thirteen countries and twenty-nine museums.