Exhibition Explorations in Europe in Berlin

The Museum of European Cultures in Berlin, located in Dahlem, opened after closing for two years due to the remodeling of its facilities to house the permanent exhibition related to cultural contacts maintained throughout history between European countries and the temporary exhibition entitled Explorations in Europe – Visual Studies in the 19th Century, which runs until April 8.

This museum founded in 1999, is heir to the old European Ethnology Museum and has about 27,000 original objects relating to everyday culture and European folk and art, which covers data from the eighteenth century to present times. The building itself was designed by German architect Bruno Paul.

The temporary exhibition is based on the study of visual representation of the nineteenth century in Europe, based on the Museum’s permanent exhibition.

In the nineteenth century artists and scientists travel to experience other cultures, explore new knowledge and enrich their minds.  Images start to be easier to register by means of photography, so travel records discoveries and scientific achievements are left for the future. There is also a major interest in collecting foreign objects.

It is a century in which curiosity dominates all areas of knowledge and creation, even the scientific term, which will be synonymous of certainty, is coined in 1833 by William Whewell. The rise of new medical products and concepts leaves behind beliefs and superstition and will give rise to the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel’s genetics theory, among others that will be discarded along the way.

The expeditions to investigate theories will generate curious objects, such as scale architectural models of buildings found along the path of the expeditions. There are also oil paintings and miniature buildings made by painter Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Kiesewetter who spent 14 years traveling through north-eastern Europe.

While photography was in its experimental stage, it was quickly adopted as a means to capture scientific images, because it allowed to freeze moments and have views from different angles in great detail and in a short time, replacing drawing or painting for scientific purposes.

Who will work with photography will be a privileged Virchow Rudolf Ludwig Karl of the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory. Virchow was a German physician dedicated to scientific research in the field of pathology, whose research led him to develop a cell theory, in which he explained that diseases originate in individual cells. In 1845 he published a study that shocked the scientific community because it described the symptoms of the first reported case of leukemia. For his work was nominated three times for the Medicine  Nobel Prize without never being able to receive it.

For more information http://www.smb.museum/smb/kalender/details.php?objID=34193

Nancy Guzman

To learn about the nineteenth century explorations and its impact on scientific progress is very interesting, so rent apartments in Berlin and visit this great exhibition to discover an unknown world.

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