The Consolation of Things - Art by Orhan Pamuk in Dresden

Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk is spending half a year as a guest artist among Dresden's Old Masters. For the exhibition "The Consolation of Things," he has recreated 41 of the 78 so-called cabinets of his famous Istanbul "Museum of Innocence" and created entirely new ones in occupation with holdings of the Dresden State Art Collections (SKD). The presentation is prominent prelude of a multi-year program series, in order to deepen the knowledge to the Turkish art and culture in past and present, as the SKD announced before the opening of the show on Thursday.

The collages from objects, pictures and texts are the first works of this kind, which Pamuk, one of the most important novelists of the present, created since completion of the Istanbul museum. They are about how objects can provide solace, but also about themes he has been exploring for years: cultural change, Occidentalism and Orientalism, fiction and memory, the role of museums. He has come to realize "that a very special value of museums is how objects relate to each other, how they relate to people and their thoughts and concerns," the 71-year-old said. "That's what I call the power of things - a consoling power against the passing of time."

In parallel, the copperplate engraving cabinet in the Residence Palace features previously unpublished photographs by Pamuk. They bear witness to his experiments in recording the arrangement of small objects on his desk, revealing one of his creative processes of discovery. The presentation will also make stops at Munich's Lenbachhaus from May to October 2024 and at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague from November 2024 to spring 2025, according to SKD.