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Kulturforum, Berlin, Germany 
13 January to 21 July 2012
Curated by John Kenneth Paranada and Paz Ponce

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A transparent plastic cube, two by three by 1.80 metres, becomes a greenhouse for looking. Within this compact volume, twelve international artists present thirty miniature works that together propose a contemporary cabinet of curiosities. The exhibition treats Berlin itself as a city scale Wunderkammer, a place where heterogeneous things meet, speak, and alter how we see. Intimate in size yet open to the world, the cube concentrates attention while letting the public realm flow through it.

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The early modern Wunderkammer emerged in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe as private collections of the rare and the marvellous. Learned collectors arranged objects for effect rather than classification, bringing naturalia, artificialia, and mirabilia into a single field of wonder. These rooms trained the eye before rational taxonomies took hold; later, museums inherited and disciplined this legacy through labels, categories, and protocols of display, with lasting political and colonial implications. This exhibition returns to that origin in order to test what occurs when a cabinet re enters the street and spectatorship becomes civic rather than private. (Findlen 1994; Pomian 1990; Daston and Park 1998; Bennett 1995)

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The title Alice in Wunder Land names a double movement. It acknowledges the lure of the exotic and places that lure under scrutiny. Berlin here reads as a living collage of languages, diasporas, and memories, neither neutral container nor marketplace of difference. The cube operates as a controlled experiment in attention. Objects speak across confines; viewers become readers of scale, surface, and provenance. In Stephen Greenblatt’s terms, the project seeks both resonance and wonder, the pulse of context and the spark of astonishment, while staying alert to the politics that accompany both. (Greenblatt 1990)

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To romance the cabinet today is to recognise its ambivalence. Cabinets schooled European desire to domesticate the distant through possession and display, prefiguring what Tony Bennett calls the exhibitionary complex, a cultural machinery that shaped citizens through visual pedagogy and discipline. They also laid groundwork for modern museums and for the taxonomic habits that separated nature from culture. Our cube interrupts that lineage by returning the cabinet to the open circulation of the Kulturforum, at once tourist crossroads and local commons. In such a setting the exotic cannot hide behind velvet ropes. It meets the tourist gaze, the passer by, and the tests of public exchange. (Bennett 1995; Urry 1990; Duncan 1995)

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The curatorial method is deliberately miniature and relational. Small scale works compress time and heighten attention. Labels recede in favour of encounter, so that objects again “speak” with one another and with the viewer, now within an ethics shaped by postcolonial critique and contemporary museology. If the historical cabinet mirrored the world while withholding it, this cabinet reflects the world back to itself and asks who is authorised to look, to classify, and to keep. (Clifford 1988; Said 1978)

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Berlin is not backdrop; it is medium. Placed within the Kulturforum, the cube returns curiosity to the public. Souvenirs, fetishes, and fragments appear not as trophies but as prompts, material invitations to think about provenance, circulation, and desire. The installation occupies the threshold between interior and exterior, between private impulse and public exchange, between the space of the subject and the space of the social. At this threshold, viewers rehearse forms of attention that are aesthetic and civic at once. (de Certeau 1984; Huyssen 2003)

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If early cabinets promised mastery through accumulation, this cabinet proposes relation through transparency. The greenhouse reveals its contents from every side and exposes its own armature. Nothing is concealed except the habitual hierarchies the work seeks to dissolve. Value is rethought. Scale no longer guarantees importance. Rarity yields to context. Ownership gives way to shared looking. In Susan Stewart’s terms, the miniature becomes a site where imagination and memory collaborate to produce worlds within reach. (Stewart 1984)

 

To call Berlin a cabinet of curiosities is not to exoticise the city. It is to acknowledge a civic capacity to assemble, to juxtapose, and to host difference without reducing it to spectacle. The cube concentrates that capacity and offers a model of public attention fit for a plural and multi-cultural  Europe. If the historical cabinet was a mirror of the world, then this cabinet is a mirror that looks back. It asks how we learned to desire the distant, how we might unlearn habits of possession, and how we could practise curiosity as responsibility rather than conquest.

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Artists

Nathalie Noé Adam; Rebeca Agnes; Atladóttir and d’Ors; Manuel Cardero; Ignacio García Sánchez; Gemis Luciani; Paula Muhr; Nicolas Puyjalon; Carolina Rümper; Anna Talens; Nuno Vicente; Mele de la Yglesia.

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Selected references

• Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Routledge, 1995.

• Clifford, James. “On Collecting Art and Culture.” In The Predicament of Culture. Harvard University Press, 1988.

• Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. Zone Books, 1998.

• de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.

• Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. Routledge, 1995.

• Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. University of California Press, 1994.

• Greenblatt, Stephen. “Resonance and Wonder.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43, no. 4 (1990): 11–34.

• Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford University Press, 2003.

• Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800. Polity, 1990.

• Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

• Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1984.

• Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. Sage, 1990.