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Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture Presents the Avantgarde : Hygiene

The Marres Centre for Contemporary Culture presents the Avantgarde: Hygiene, open 24 october 2010 – 30 january 2011.

Transparent organizations’, ‘clear wishes’; the key concepts transparency and clarity, which originated in the hygiene movement of the early twentieth century, have had a lasting effect on our language to this day. The coming exhibition within the long-term program covering the avant-garde investigates the both fascinating and dramatic background of the notion hygiene. How did this word transform from a scientific concept into a global movement? How was it subsequently used by the national socialism in Nazi-Germany and the socialism of the former DDR as an essential part of both ideologies?

Hygiene – the story of a museum approaches these questions using the history of the Hygiene Museum in Dresden. Founded in 1911 by the inventor of Odol mouthwash, this museum still represents a unique position. The museum does not necessarily collect art or design, but has actively contributed to the awareness of diseases such as TB and cancer. This museum primarily has a social function – from information to prevention and education – and the physical results of those such as casts of skin conditions, promotional films and educational material, which have been produced and subsequently presented by this museum until ‘Die Wende’. The museum had the ambition to ‘reveal that which had hitherto been invisible’. An abstraction of an eye is still used as a logo on all its correspondence. Developing new exhibition models to reach broader audiences has been a primary point of interest, and the use of new technologies such as films has been of big importance in that ambition.

The unique, social role of this a-historical museum and the specific attention for the exhibition as medium to make the invisible still visible makes the Hygiene Museum a fascinating subject. Especially for Marres, which has been investigating the role of the museum, the exhibition and the artist, and has been developing new exhibition models for several years as well. Moreover, it has become apparent that the social role of the museum, the arts and the design has taken on a renewed actuality.

The exhibition arose in cooperation with the Hygiene Museum, which made several unique loans available for the exhibition. An example is the so-called Glass Man: admired as the symbol of the desire for a transparent body and reviled as the perverse outcome of rationalism gone too far. The research and production team consists of Claudia Banz, Guus Beumer, Maureen Mooren, Floor Krooi and EventArchitectuur. The exhibition consists of three so-called thoughtscapes, which through the use of several objects, films, printing material and texts give insight into three aspects of the Hygiene Museum:

Museum as Discourse focuses on making the invisible visible, on striving towards transparency, which can be seen as a dominant ambition of the twentieth century. In Museum as Practice, the pedagogical strive for education on hygiene and the diffusion of scientific knowledge takes central place. Museum as Ideology offers insights into the meaning and the practical mission of hygiene in connection to the political and social-economical systems that characterize the Germany of the twentieth century.

Curators: Guus Beumer and Claudia Banz In cooperation with EventArchitectuur

Image: Hygiene Museum Dresden

Marres
Centre for Contemporary Culture
Capucijnenstraat 98
6211 RT Maastricht
telephone: +31 (0)43 3270207
fax: +31 (0)43 3270208
[email protected]

www.marres.org

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