Objects of Embodiment: A “Post-Material Turn” in Exhibiting Lost Material Culture

Abstract

Exhibiting lost material culture goes beyond documenting, preserving, reconstructing, and staging material traces of the past. Museums, possessing modest collections of original historical objects, have to search for new ways of exhibiting material culture thereby replacing facts (original objects, documents, documentary media) by bodily experience similar to that evoked by mystical religious art addressing different human senses beyond the vision. Bodily sensations can be evoked by ambiences, following expressionist or constructivist architecture, by sculptural displays in tradition of the avant-garde, by soundscapes and large scale image projections evoking illusion and immersion. The “post-material turn” comprises thus not only virtual culture, but also new material approaches to the memory of the past, shifting from original historical artifacts to reproductions and substitutes, evoking an intense bodily experience. Although history gets space for embodiment, such ambiences evoke a strong sense of loss, because they avoid immediate contact with traces of the past by virtual and material “doubles”. The “post-material turn” will be discussed with the example of The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, relating it to other contemporary “postdocumentary” and “post-factual” phenomena in memorial culture.