“The Museum of Innocence” is both a celebrated novel by Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk and a museum he has created in his native Istanbul, Turkey. At the Museum of Innocence, the novel and the museum are intertwined in multiple ways, with objects and relics belonging to the novel’s characters displayed in an evocative total installation. As such, the museum acts as a kind of device to construct what critic Roland Barthes called “the reality effect” – that illusion of truth that is achieved through the apparently most insignificant details. “The Museum of Innocence” serves as a model for the type of “personal museum” that Pamuk has been advocating for since the publication of his “Modest Manifesto for Museums” in 2012. “The aim of present and future museums must not be to represent the state, but to re-create the world of single human beings,” he writes. “It is imperative that museums become smaller, more individualistic, and cheaper. This is the only way that they will ever tell stories on a human scale. Big museums with their wide doors call upon us to forget our humanity and embrace the state and its human masses. (…) The measure of a museum’s success should (…) be its capacity to reveal the humanity of individuals.”
Images: Courtesy of Refik Anadol and the Innocence Foundation
