Abstract
The private museum is seeing an unprecedented boom in recent years. Private museums provide a space for collectors to showcase their collection in a curated display and an alternative platform for artists to push boundaries in the expression of various art forms. In this context, I discuss well-known Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence in the context of collection studies, acquisitions and museum-building. Renewed interest in the small museum makes my intervention pertinent: placing Pamuk’s novel alongside his museum in Istanbul allows me to analyse the evocation of the city’s identity that this intersection of his fiction and the museum effects. The rich, textured, historical pictures of Istanbul are now undercut by the everydayness of the local and the small. The material elements constituting the city are invested with an emotional value in the collector’s vitrines, and the objects together encapsulate an unconventional history of the city. What does this merging of the illusory and real do for readers and museum visitors? How does this sort of catalogue novel and exhibition space expand on our understanding of the city? In asking what came first—the novel or the museum—I emphasise the sense of play that only the space of the city can engender. Finally, I show how mass-produced objects and their artistic display awaken the same space, and the implications this has for furthering our understanding of the city. As Delhi gears up for its own City Museum, the influence of local narratives cannot be underestimated in marking the personality and distinctiveness of the city.
Bio
Pallavi Narayan, currently based in Singapore, holds a PhD in literature and sociology from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (2016), where she has also taught Communication Skills. She is developing her doctoral work, titled “Pamuk’s Istanbul: Everyday Architecture”, into a book. She has guest lectured on the Minor in Art History at the National University of Singapore. Her research, poetry, art and book reviews have been published in journals, magazines and anthologies, and she will be moderating a panel on the library in fiction at the upcoming Singapore Writers Festival. She has been working in book publishing for over a decade: she is Acquisitions Editor with the National University of Singapore Press, and has previously worked with Singapore Management University, University of Indonesia, Penguin Random House, Pan Macmillan and Routledge.