Antje Majewski, The World of Gimel: How to Make Objects Talk

German artist Antje Majewski has a very personal quest – for the meanings of objects in museums and other collections. In a multimedia structure of painting, video, installation and a book, this project looks at a series of collection templates, and finds for example that museums are places of magic practices or arenas of the “impaired” use of objects. Is it possible to replace inanimate art objects by living things? Can objects think or speak? And can we create objects whose thinking connects with ours?

The World of Gimel is the result of a profound investigation of various collections, including the encyclopaedic structure of the 200-year-old Universalmuseum Joanneum. It is also Antje Majewski’s interpretation of how you make objects talk. Her own “museum” is a kind of language laboratory, a rhizomatic construct of multi-layered connections that sums up an expanded museum experience as supra-intellectual, hyper-semantic and “universal”. On the way, classifications, systematisations and symbolic categorisations are seized upon in an almost hallucinatory process of interrogating and doubting with reference to the ontologies of objects.