Sharing Stories

Ethnographic museums often have a difficult history of collecting, research and display. Many objects found in such museums were acquired, or looted, in the context of colonialism. The history of racially motivated research and expropriation, and the problems of interpreting and representing ‘the Other’, are often invisible in the display of these objects.

Against this background, in late 2014, Adler and historian and art-educator Karin Schneider were invited by the Weltmuseum Wien to develop a concept for a public outreach project during the period when the museum was closed for renovations. Working with the museum’s curators Claudia Augustat and Jani Kuhnt-Saptodewo and the Viennese cultural institution Brunnenpassage, Sharing Stories was developed through an interdisciplinary collaboration based on Adler’s artistic concept.

Between 2015 and 2017, 10 pop-up stations in Vienna invited the public to bring an object meaningful to them and tell its story. A dedicated interview format developed for the project generated approximately 150 personal accounts. From simple, everyday objects such as a key or a necklace, to rare objects such as a box for a missing film or a handmade ritual mask, participants shared stories of love and friendship, loss and longing, belonging and alienation, faith, passion, migration, terror, assimilation, and hope. An open-access archive of the objects’ photographs and summaries of their stories gradually developed on the museum’s website. The objects themselves were not collected by the museum but remained with their owners.

From these 150 stories, 20 were selected for further development. Adler photographed the objects, mostly in the places where their owners kept them, creating a series titled Object Portraits. The original interviews were expanded into filmed conversations with the owners. In addition, other contributors were also filmed, offering their own perspectives on each object, introducing different interpretations and forms of knowledge alongside the owners’ accounts. Rather than producing a definitive interpretation of each object, these different perspectives were presented alongside one another, allowing their relationships, agreements and contradictions to emerge.

The project culminated in an exhibition at the reopened Weltmuseum Wien in 2017. The exhibition presented the Object Portraits series, two interactive media stations featuring filmed conversations with the objects’ owners and additional contributors, and a four-channel video projection combining images of the objects with excerpts from the interviews. An accompanying book brought together photographs of all 150 objects and summaries of their owners’ stories.

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Exhibition views and selected works: Click to enlarge

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