The collection XXX – The Museum of Forgotten History, with intervention by Maarten Vanden Eynde
Event
M HKA, Antwerpen
29 June 2012 - 16 September 2012
Maarten Vanden Eynde’s project Museum of Forgotten History housed the remains of a possible future past. The exhibition took the form of fiction, a kind of science fiction, where a selection of works by Vanden Eynde and numerous works from the M HKA collection acted as props.
The exhibits touched numerous socially and politically relevant issues, such as post-industrialization, capitalism and ecology, and thus offered a perspective on the state of our society at the start of the 21st century. Through the presentation of these unusual items, all made with a variety of natural and artificial materials, Vanden Eynde continued his materials study, exploring the modern roots of ‘progress’.
The exhibition at the M HKA reflected the conventional order of the 'modern' museum. The Museum of Forgotten History, however, left room for the use of fiction as a means of interpretation, through the very playful logic of watching these unusual objects as if they were the 'discoveries' of the future. Beyond the physical objects of the exhibited artefacts, the role of the narrative took centre stage. Besides ‘the normal course of events’ and its layers of meaning, memory and projection, new facts were formed.
