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Permanent Exhibition Jewish Museum Berlin

ARGE chezweitz and Hella Rolfes Architekten

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Bronze
Entrance to the core exhibition - Welcome Point - Alexander Butz for chezweitz
View of the epoch room Ashkenaz - Alexander Butz for chezweitz
Epoch Room "Catastrophe" - Alexander Butz for chezweitz
Entrance to the core exhibition - Welcome Point - Alexander Butz for chezweitz

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Comments
Innovation
Functionality
Creativity
Eco-Social Impact
Total
JURY VOTES
Exhibition
5.71
6.79
6.36
5.00
5.96
Client
Jewish Museum Berlin
Floor area
3000 ㎡
Completion
2020
Exhibition Design
Exhibition Design
Exhibition Design
Exhibition Graphics
Lighting design

In August 2020, the Jewish Museum Berlin opened its new permanent exhibition in the Libeskind Building in Berlin. In close collaboration with the curators, chezweitz created a separate spatial concept for each exhibition chapter that provides the content on an informative and sensual level, while at the same time repeatedly taking up the building itself conceptually and formally. In the new spaces, the architecture interlocks with the exhibits, art installations, hands-on stations, virtual reality offerings, and digital app formats to tell of the history and present day Jewish culture in Germany from an inside perspective. Our scenography takes the iconography of the building very seriously, this sense of disruption in the course of Jewish history in Germany, and transfers its external disharmony into epochal and thematic rooms, which despite their diversity stand in a morphological context. Each room here is a scenographic unicum, which in their totality constitute the new museum experience - the rooms entice, and therefore do not need any visitor guidance! The backbone of the new permanent exhibition is formed by targeted spatial strategies, which were also the tools of our artistic scenography. The Libeskind building captivates with its strong architectural elements, including the so-called void bridges and the scar-like window cuts in the façade. Exposed and without design overlay, they now stand for what they are: a symbolic rupture expressing pain and emptiness. These "scars" are by no means made over, but are integrated into the scenography as an interior-exterior structure. The metal character of the building and its variety of surfaces is also used strategically and becomes a supporting material for the design: metal turns into a vibrating sound passage, moving, wavy, vertical and shimmering in different sound colors. It is a fine, colorful background of showcase bodies or, as part of the unimaginable - the Holocaust - it can become non-material - the shock of mirrorlessness! A total of five epochal and eight thematic rooms develop in an exhibition narrative that unites all the arts: each impressive in its characteristics and responding individually to the architecture, like the medieval, urban-looking exhibit landscape in the room "Ashkenaz". A few rooms further on, we encounter an artistic reconstruction of Erich Mendelssohn's Universum cinema. A paper sheet architecture of sheets hanging from the ceiling shows with printed paragraphs the creeping disenfranchisement of the Jewish population from 1933 on, before it continues in the labyrinth of the Holocaust, whose rooms no longer offer any support or ground ... Scenography, architecture, knowledge and history culminate in this historical, contemporary Berlin location to a spatial experience that seeks comparison in the biography of the city and pointsopen, tolerant and self-confident into the future with it’s proud Jewish history!