Lenbahchaus Museum is exhibiting Orhan Pamuk’s artworks, archives, sketches, illustrations, and notebooks in The Consolation of Objects, which starts on May 17 and continues through October 13.
Pamuk is presenting his multifaceted creative output as a writer, photographer, graphic artist, curator, museum founder, and important political voice in today’s world. The writer tells his stories through objects.
Based on his Istanbul “Museum of Innocence” with everyday objects associated with his novel of the same title, he transposes literature into the museum space, creating fictions that visitors can enter and immerse themselves in. Pamuk’s museum illuminates the love story between Kemal, the son of a factory owner, and his fair cousin Füsun. When their relationship ends in disaster, Kemal establishes a museum filled with thousands of objects that remind him of Füsun.
At the same time, the objects reflect everyday life in Istanbul from the 1950s to the 2000s — and hence also major events of the same period, gender roles, contemporary cinema, and more. In three-dimensional collages that, like cabinets of curiosity, unfold a world of their own, the power of things attains poetic immediacy. Forty cabinets from the Istanbul museum that Pamuk reconstructed for the traveling exhibition are on view in Munich.
