The World of Gimel – How to Make Objects Talk (+ DVD)

The alchemy of things is at the core of Antje Majewski's multimedia project, which aims at rethinking the representation and meaning of objects in the form of a highly personal and quasi-surreal collection. Based on the investigation of various museums and collections—including research into the encyclopedic structure of the 200-year-old Universalmuseum Joanneum—Majewski presents a utopian and subversive (and seemingly absurd) take on how to make objects talk. Thus Majewski's own museum is a sort of language laboratory—a rhizomatic structure of multilayered connections, a hybrid that sums up an advanced museological experience as beyond spiritual, universal, and hyper-semantics. The project refers to a variety of museum patterns, including the museum as a place of magical practices, or the museum as a site of disrupture and cultural displacement regarding former or other orders and uses of things.