COLLECTION. THE ORDER OF THINGS (2024)

About the exhibition

The exhibition is dedicated to collecting, a significant phenomenon of the Modern Age and its contemporary interpretation. The practice of collecting different kinds of objects of common features is inherent to human beings. it is also a way of engaging with the world. The first collections were discovered in the tombs of ancient Egypt, and the first cabinets of rarities appeared in Europe in the 16th century, becoming one of the prototypes of the modern museum.

The exhibition project Collection invites us to explore the phenomenon of the collection in a contemporary context. The categories that organised kunstkamerias and rare objects cabinets, followed by museum collections, were sort of stable classical canons: the history of linear time, geography, fields of knowledge, techniques, materials, authorship. Contemporary times, on the other hand, drew attention to specific, unexpected and highly original principles of joining objects into specific narratives. Timeless and cross-historical categories, contexts, which earlier were difficult to present together, are now replacing rational and encyclopaedic ways of connecting things. Thus, things and phenomena are broken out of their usual taxonomies and brought together in whimsical assemblages.

It is to this phenomenon that the exhibition creators refer to as the “postkunstkammer” and dedicate this project. Indeed, according to the curators, when we collect artefacts we collect worlds. The exhibition will feature not only strange and unobvious collections of objects, but also reflections on the very nature of collecting, new approaches and methods of connecting objects. After all, today it is more a process with an open result than an obsession with possession of things. It is a research and experiment to discover the optics of an author.