Identities on Display
2013Instead of checking in their coats, jackets and bags at the cloakroom, visitors are invited to hang them in one of the 26 glass lockers installed in the entrance hall. Each locker individually highlights visitors’ personal belongings, thus transforming them into authentic museum exhibits. These constantly changing exhibits remain in place for the duration of each owner’s visit to the collection safely stowed away as if they were in regular lockers yet on display for every other visitor to the museum. The pieces of clothing reflect their owners’ personalities, creating portraits of people who – like the former owners of the museum exhibits – are temporarily absent. The collection of objects, with their different colours, materials, labels and accessories provides clues to the season, as well as to the visitors’ national and cultural origins, their age and their numbers. Thus the historical exhibits from all over the world in the museum are juxtaposed by a context firmly rooted in the present, a here and now in which cultural differences seem to be increasingly blurred.
Text: © Studio Karin Sander, Translation: Stephen Richards
Presented in exhibitions
Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin, 2013Kunstmuseum Villa Zanders, Bergisch Gladbach, 2017
Kunst Museum Winterthur, 2018
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2021
Museion, Bolzano, 2020