Scholarly record

THE IDEA OF DECONSTRUCTION AND CONTEMPORARY HISTORY MUSEUMS

A. Malecka, P. Mroz

Abstract

The paper’s main topic focuses on the idea of deconstruction and its illustration in contemporary history museums, both in the sphere of their actual style, architecture and more elusive narrative. First, the Derridean concept of deconstruction is discussed. It constitutes the point of reference bringing about the phenomenon of the 21st century museums as artifacts whose form, space and the narrative are open to multiplicity of commentaries and interpretations. The postmodern ideas of fragmentation, lack of harmony, symmetry and continuity in deconstructionist architecture of museum buildings are presented as conveying the message of nonunivocal meaning of history, symbolically reconstructed in fragments, “ruins”, gaps and absences. On the other hand, H.– G. Gadamer’s concept of “things of the past” which make the past a part of the present is also quoted, as well as Roman Ingarden’s concept of concretization of the museum “areas of indeterminacy” within the aesthetic experience of the observer. The text is illustrated with the examples of museums devoted to traumatic historical events of the Word War II: The Jewish Museum in Berlin, with its dialectics of absence and presence, and the Warsaw Uprising Museum, offering interactive games with the visitor. The analysed museums activate the visitors to hermeneutically constitute the present significance of history within their own experience, artistically inspired by the museum fragmentation space.

Publication details

Back to publication list