Somewhere in the storage vaults of the Museum der Kulturen Basel, a small ceramic owl from Mexico sat among hundreds of its brown, grey and white feathered companions. It was a vessel flute, unremarkable in form. What made the curatorial team stop was its colour: a vivid, unapologetic pink. That single object became the anchor for Our Owl Is Pink — Colourful Stories, an exhibition running until 24 January 2027 that treats dye and pigment as a lens onto power, protection, identity and trade.
Can you spot the PInk Owl? Although small, the pink owl stands out among its owl friends at the opening of the exhibition.
Up close. The pink ceramic owl is a vessel flute from Mexico, made before 1973 and served as inspiration for the curation of Our Owl Is Pink — Colourful Stories.
For textile lovers, the show's real depth lies in its cloth. Take vyshyvanka, the white Ukrainian blouses embroidered in bright, symbolic patterns once believed to guard the wearer against evil spirits, particularly at the vulnerable openings of sleeves and necklines. Since Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, and more urgently since the 2022 invasion, these garments have shifted from folk dress into a worn form of resistance, a shift Volodymyr Zelenskyy made visible when he appeared in an embroidered shirt referencing the tradition.
Ukrainian blouses. Originally, the colourful embroideries protected against misfortune; today, they are symbols of resistance.
Central Java's batik tradition gets similarly close attention. The exhibition walks through batik tulis, the hand-drawn resist-dyeing method in which artisans apply liquid wax with a canting before dipping cloth into successive dye baths, the waxed sections resisting colour each time. Traditional cloths from the region hold to a restrained palette: the cotton's natural tone, blue, brown and a deep blue-black achieved by overdyeing blue with brown. UNESCO recognised Javanese batik in 2009, and its patterns still carry meanings tied to life stages and status that predate any museum wall label.
Above: View into the hall "In a frenzy of color". Below: Ndop cloth, Bamum, maker unknown, Cameroon, before 1953, cotton, indigo.
Dye sourcing forms its own strand of the exhibition. Crimson from cochineal insects, harvested from prickly pear cacti in such quantity that 50 grams of dye required around 100,000 insects, became a colonial commodity Spain controlled between America and Europe from the late sixteenth century. Indigo travelled the same trade routes, pressed into cakes for shipping and prized for the deep blue it lent to cloth, from Central Java's batik to textiles far beyond it, its production and trade equally entangled with colonial economies. In Oaxaca, murex sea snails yield a milky secretion that darkens to deep purple on contact with sunlight, still used today for women's festive dress. And in Mexico, rosa mexicano has its own named history: fashion designer Ramón Valdiosera is credited with popularising the shade in the 1940s, while Diego Rivera brought bright acrylic colour into Metepec's ceramics production.
Green feather headdress of the Kofan from Colombia, dating from around 1970, which protects the wearer and identifies him as a shaman.
Further afield, colour served as camouflage and communication in equal measure. In the Amazonian rainforests of South America, the green plumage of parrots and parakeets renders the birds nearly invisible among the leaves, a shade so effective that people have long collected moulted feathers to fashion into jewellery. Elsewhere in the Amazon, feather ornaments work in the opposite direction, announcing rather than concealing: indigenous communities use specific colours and combinations to signal group identity, age and role, with yellow feathers often standing for the sun's power and the force of life itself.
Station: Textiles - Carmine red and colonial trade, carpets, ponchos and skirts from Central and South America, where the tradition of dyeing with carmine red is still upheld today.
None of this is presented as spectacle. The exhibition was co-developed with children and visitors who are blind, partially sighted, deaf or hearing impaired, built around touch, sound and hands-on making rather than glass cases alone. It asks a deceptively simple question: what does a colour mean, and who decided that?
. . .
Further Information:
Our Owl Is Pink: Colourful Stories is on show until 24 January 2027 at Museum der Kulturen Basel.
. . .
Image Credits:
Lead: Wedding dress blouse, Mixtec, Santa Catarina Mechoacan, Oaxaca, Mexico, around 1972 . Collection Valentin Jaquet. Courtesy of Museum der Kulturen Basel
All further images courtesy of as Museum der Kulturen Basel and credited in captions.