1:1 Period Rooms

Midway through the past century the historically appointed period room in many museums made way for the ‘white cube’. Modern art needed neutral, white exhibition walls instead of historically decorated rooms. From 1 February to 6 April 2015 Het Nieuwe Instituut is taking the period room as the basis for a programme devoted to exhibition models. For 1:1 Period Rooms, the Greek architect and artist Andreas Angelidakis designs an installation and draws on period rooms held in the collection at the Amsterdam Museum, which have not been presented to the public since the 1970s.  

INSTALLATION

Angelidakis sometimes highlights only a fragment or uses just the structure of the period rooms that will come to Rotterdam. He isolates and combines in an exploratory and associative manner as he tells a story about the changing meaning of space in the history of exhibiting. The installation consists of five spaces, each one a passage in an invisible discussion between the period room and other exhibition typologies.

The crowning work of 1:1 Period Rooms is the Empire Room from the collection of the Amsterdam Museum. This 19th-century period room will be reconstructed for the exhibition in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam and Amsterdam Museum. On Wednesday and Sunday afternoons the public can watch the restoration experts at work.

PERIOD ROOMS

A period room is a room that is decorated in a particular style. Such rooms were popular as museum presentations in the late 19th century. Furniture, wall covering and works of art had to combine to offer a ‘stylistically pure’ impression of the 18th century in particular. In response to rapid industrialisation, applied art from the baroque and renaissance periods were particularly seen as examples of good taste. The period room was an educational tool to evoke an ideal (national) past and to promote traditional crafts.

WHITE CUBE

The period rooms that go on display at Het Nieuwe Instituut originally come from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where in the 1970s they had to make way for the rapidly expanding collection of modern art. In the late 1930s, Willem Sandberg started to display works of art against clean, white walls, first as conservator and from 1945 on as director. The original historicist museum interior gradually made way for neutral exhibition galleries. Since then, the so-called ‘white cube’ has been a dominant typology in the museum world, although that dogma has been called into question in recent decades.

DISCURSIVE PROGRAMME

With 1:1 Period Rooms Het Nieuwe Instituut invites the public to discuss the design of the room as ‘representer’ of an ideology. The white wall was of great importance for the development of modern art. New developments such as digitisation and democratisation now call for new presentation models. The discursive programme of 1:1 Period Rooms focuses on the spatial strategies that in part determine discourse and representation in museums.

INTERIOR TRIPTYCH

1:1 Period Rooms is one instalment in a triptych devoted to interiors. Het Nieuwe Instituut previously presented the exhibition 1:1 Sets for Erwin Olaf & Bekleidung. These will be followed in 2016 by an exhibition devoted to the showroom. Each instalment of the triptych is based on 1:1 models (i.e. at full size) and explores the meaning of representation and authenticity. The triptych forms part of the programme track Landscape and Interior.