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Project T:
Exhibition "Spectacle of Power. Rituals in Old Europe 800-1800"
| Abstract |
The Project prepares, in collaboration with the Museum for Cultural History in Magdeburg, an exhibition "Spectacle of Power. Rituals in Old Europe 800-1800". This art and cultural-historical exhibition will be shown from 21 September 2008 to 4 January 2009 in the Museum of Cultural History in Magdeburg. Basis for the project is an intensive cooperation between university and museum in all areas of the planning and execution of the exhibition. An interdisciplinary advisory board made up of historians and art historians will accompany the project.
In cooperation with all individual projects, the exhibition is intended to present and make understandable to the broad public the ways in which rituals staged the political and social order of medieval and early modern societies and their values. With around 250 exhibits from different European countries, the exhibition bears witness to ritualism from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age on up to the French Revolution.
The exhibition is divided into two main themes. The first part focuses on four of the many rituals from this period, all four of which have to do with the appointment to a position or an office: imperial coronation, consecration of a bishop, election of councillors, appointment of a rector. The second part of the exhibition delves more deeply into the basic aspects of pre-modern ritualism: elementary forms and functions, duration and change, parody and failure. Here the exhibition looks beyond the rituals of appointment and takes up other elements. Special attention is given to the symbolic "basic vocabulary" of individual gestures and symbols, their mythological models, religious archetypes and parodistic inversions. Moreover, the second part also deals with the changes in the forms and functions of rituals over the course of centuries.
A further element in the preparation of the exhibition will be a richly illustrated catalogue, a museum educational booklet and an international symposium on the topic held in Münster from 10 to 12 October 2007 on the topic "The Visuality of Symbolic Acts".
For further information please visit our website and have a look at our informative booklet (Download (PDF 1,4 MB):
http://www.spektakeldermacht.de.
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