Things are Changing: Museums and the Material Turn (original) (raw)

This article offers one of the many possible answers to the question of what changes museums. It is argued that changing knowledge about museum things has, and has had, enormous influence on the approaches museums adapt to display their collections. A new relationship between things and people has developed since the 1970s. This change in epistemology that became known as material turn was mirrored in changing approaches to exhibition design in museums. To trace these interrelated changes, the article focuses on two German museums of history (Historical Museum Frankfurt and Werkbund-Archive/museum of things in Berlin) and follows their shifts in exhibition design during the last 50 years. In reacting to the latest developments in knowledge about museum objects, they firstly replaced their glass cases with text-book-exhibitions, and then they installed stage-like combinations of objects (scenographies), simply to reinstall glass showcases at the end of the century. Keywords: museum object, history of epistemology, exhibition design, German museums