Out of the Box

The exhibition Out of the Box adds personal accounts to the overall narration of the Weltmuseum Wien. It gets to the bottom of what museum objects can tell us about the lifeworlds of people in Vienna with and without migration experience. At the same time, we raise questions about the different contexts which the objects might have been confronted with before their transfer. The diaspora dialogues intend to find out how these objects are seen today and what people in Vienna want the Museum to know about its collections.  

A group of thirty contributors selected objects that in one way or another relate to their cultural heritage. The objects serve as a starting point for them to think about their own story and to find the connecting lines between the past and the present. Their narratives address such issues as identity, belonging, spirituality, homelessness, borders, and border crossings.

While the exhibited museum objects are accompanied by videos, texts, and photographs, the exhibition itself becomes a vehicle for rethinking questions of mobility, migration, and belonging. The many different stories of diaspora were captured on film by the photographer Aleksandra Pawloff and the filmmaker Marc Jarabe. 

Out of the Box was developed in the context of SWICH – Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage, and was co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Curated by Camilo Antonio (initiator of UrbanNomadMixes), Jani Kuhnt-Saptodewo, and Doris Prlić (both Weltmuseum Wien), the exhibition is the result of a cooperation between the Weltmuseum Wien and UrbanNomadMixes.