Apart from the permanent collection the Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge shows a new installation focusing on furniture as a museum object beyond the usual attribution to a designer or a stylistic context. This new presentation questions the relationship between movables and space.
The main part of the exhibition is Carolina Kecsmemethy’s installation “Can-Can”, which creates an unusual “thing-landscape” consisting of her large collection of miniature furniture pieces. Kecsmemethy puts this arrangement in relation to drawing and to a video work about Jacques Offenbach’s “Can-Can” music.
Kecsmemethy’s intention to create an image of cultural estrangement and heterogenous composition is confronted with the museum’s presentation and intensified by it. A basic aspect of a museum’s tasks is shown by the serial arrangement of a large number of second-hand miniature furniture from different periods and different cultural origins. A museum works with objects that are torn from their original context and therefore appear as stranded goods of history.
The size of this commenting exhibition creates a new view on the storage presentation of the WMD, focusing on its arrangement. The artistic, museum-reflecting and playful-theatrical adoptions refer to each other. A dialogue based on the tension between big and small, reality and model, area and space begins.