Exhibition

Mobile Worlds

or The Museum of our Transcultural Present
13 Apr 2018 - 14 Oct 2018 | Museum fĂŒr Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

The Johann Jacobs Museum is working on new forms of exhibiting in a small format. It ignores the usual museological concepts and categories to focus all its attention on a transcultural, intermediate realm. This intermediate realm knows no cultural identity, because it stems from relationships of exchange between North and South, East and West.

Mobile Worlds—an exhibition curated by Roger M. Buergel in collaboration with Sophia Prinz and Julia Lerch-Zajączkowska—at Museum fĂŒr Kunst und Gewerbe (MKG) Hamburg marks our first opportunity to handle a large collection with encyclopedic aspirations. The collection at the museum is inspired by the great world exhibitions held in London, Paris and Vienna in the 19th-century. Like its antetypes it follows the traditional, museological division into geographies, nations, epochs, art and non-art. Mobile Worlds in contrast is dedicated to objects that escape the established museum order—things that cannot be called either “modern” or “antique,” that are neither clearly “Chinese” nor “Persian.” The exhibition is guided by two questions: How can global interconnectedness be exhibited and what should a global museum aspire to today?

As part of Mobile Worlds we are showing not only holdings from the MKG Hamburg and contemporary works of art, but also parts of the exhibitions Omoshirogara, Mutual Aid and Coffee from HelvĂ©cia, as well as groups of work by Maya Deren and Lina Bo Bardi. We are also showing old holdings from our own museum collection, including SĂšvres porcelain (ca. 1750) adorned with Indian textile patterns and a gouache paining by Adolf Menzel. The gouache was created at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair and shows an “Indian tent” with black service staff.

More at mobile-welten.org/en/exhibition/

Events