Visitors to Munich's Lenbachhaus Museum can experience a unique exhibition of visual art by Turkish Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, titled “The Consolation of Objects.” The title is from a chapter in Pamuk’s novel of lost love, “The Museum of Innocence,” in which the wealthy but forlorn Kemal takes solace in collecting items and objects that had belonged to his cousin Füsun. His collection becomes at once an obsession and a consolation, and in the end, it numbers thousands of objects.
Pamuk, 71, wrote the novel – published in 2008 – at the same time that he himself was collecting items from flea markets both in his home city of Istanbul and on his travels all around the world for the specific purpose of creating his own museum. The result of his efforts was the award-winning Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, which opened in 2012. The collection there consists of 83 showcases – the same number of chapters in the novel.
And while for Pamuk they were separate projects – writing a novel while also creating a museum – often the two would intersect. ”Sometimes I would find an item that I knew had to find a place in the novel,” Pamuk told Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa). “And sometimes, while writing the story, I imagined some object or photograph that I actually wanted to go out and find.
” Like his native city, the collections reflect the two worlds of Occidentalism and Orientalism. The displays are a mixture of Western images, objects, and texts .
