Exhibition: Sacred Dirt- Mother Teresa and Volunteering in Kolkata

The South Asia Institute is pleased to invite you to an upcoming exhibition based on a research project by Lecturer Egor Novikov, titled Sacred Dirt: Mother Teresa and Volunteering in Kolkata.

The exhibition will be held at the Völkerkundemuseum VPST (Hauptstraße 235). It will open on July 12 with a vernissage at 6 p.m. On the next day, July 13 at 2:30 p.m. there will be a guided tour. The running time of the exhibition is from 13.07.2025 - 22.03.2026.

How can we understand dirt, illness and death if we cannot avoid them, but have to accept them? This exhibition takes an ethnographic look at the day-to-day work in the hospices of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, India. It shows what happens when volunteers - often young people from the West, mostly without experience in caring for the dying - expose themselves to a radical practice of closeness and care. Photographs, drawings, videos and text fragments document not only the physical work of washing, caring and touching, but also the inner processes that take place in these encounters: between compassion and excessive demands, spiritual ideal and cultural foreignness. Many volunteers experience this place as transformative - but their experiences remain ambivalent. What does it mean to help in a context that you barely understand? Where are the boundaries between devotion, helplessness and self-assurance? The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on these areas of tension. It opens our eyes to the spiritual and moral significance of disgust, physical vulnerability, crossing boundaries and the proximity to death - not only in India, but as a universal challenge of human interaction.