Arthub Favorite: Week 88

Love, Museums, Inspiration
The Museum of Innocence of Orhan Pamuk in Milan

Duration: 2018 January 19–June 24
Venue: Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, Via Gesù, 5, 20121 Milan, Italy

At the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum there will be an exhibit dedicated to the Museum of Innocence of Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Pamuk’s extraordinary “museum operation,” which has fascinated art historians, museologists and contemporary art critics, will encounter the places that inspired it: the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum. In the exhibit Love, Museums, Inspiration. The Museum of Innocence of Orhan Pamuk in Milan, curated by Lucia Pini and Laura Lombardi and realized with the support of the Region of Lombardy, 29 cases from the museum in Istanbul will be displayed from January 19 to June 24, 2018. Conceived by Pamuk in an indissoluble manner with the novel of the same name, the Museum of Innocence’s cases enclose objects placed and assembled in a way to evoke the different stages of the tormented love of Kemal for Füsun set against Istanbul of the 1970s and 1980s. Each case is a world unto itself, full of cross-references that mix hints of occidental and oriental cultures. Videos narrated by Orhan Pamuk, himself, accompany the visitor in the maze of his creative imagination and illustrate the strong tie between the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, where Pamuk presented the Italian version of his novel in 2009.

After all, the synchronicity of the work of the author/artist Pamuk and that of many contemporary artists, whose works are conceived in the guise of collections, is founded on the will, not to recount history, but to give birth to stories within a vision that is at once utopian and realistic.

The Milanese exhibit, which follows that of London (2016) and of Oslo (2017), stands out with respect to the preceding ones because it both physically and conceptually unites the Turkish and the Italian museum. “In the short circuits created between Milan / Istanbul and reality / fiction, visitors find themselves walking in the very footsteps of Kemal, in a journey dense with citations of the theme of collecting, of the relationships between artistic and daily use objects, as well as between real and false, copy and reproduction,” so affirm the curators of the exhibit, Lucia Pini and Laura Lombardi.