While in Berlin we visited the must-see museums (Pergamon, Neues Museum, and the surprisingly unpopular Gemäldegalerie), but one of the strangest and most interesting museums we visited was the Design Panoptikum. The Panoptikum is a private museum operated and curated by the surrealist artist Vlad Korneev. Vlad is a primarily a photographer, and one part of the museum displayed some of his works:
The main attraction is a collection of objects Vlad has collected over the years that he has put together in really nontraditional ways to create surreal scenes. For example:
The doctor will see you now.
Much of the collection is made up of sports equipment, old cameras and lights, and medical instruments. The overall effect is…weird. Vlad says the main point of the museum is that we all love fantasy and science fiction books and movies but are much less interested in history. However, the history of these objects (e.g. an iron lung) is sometimes more wild and fantastical than any science fiction story. He wants his visitors to be creative and imagine stories behind the objects, and he promised us we would leave two times smarter! While I don’t know if we succeeded on that front, we were very amused by the museum and appreciated Vlad’s personal touch telling stories and even trying on some of the items in his collection.
Here are some more photos. Perhaps you too can use your imagination and be twice as smart when you finish this blog post!
What is going on here?
