With the integrated exhibition series The Second Glance – with two current instalments: "All Forms of Love" and "Women" – visitors are invited to interrogate the permanent exhibition of the Bode-Museum, looking at it from the perspective of contemporary social issues. The overarching objective of the series is to insert previously hidden narratives into official museum discourses. Visitors follow thematic paths, along which they are encouraged to take a “second glance” at the works of the Skulpturensammlung and the Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, allowing the works to be discovered in new and different ways.
With its important sculpture collection, the Bode-Museum is first and foremost a museum of human beings – no other art form offers such a distinctive depiction of their physical form, bodily presence and sometimes even their individual appearance. The Skulpturensammlung and the Museum für Byzantinische Kunst cover over 1,500 years of Europe’s artistic and cultural history, making them particularly well-suited for series like The Second Glance, which deal with human identities and their artistic depiction.
In The Second Glance: Women, the current instalment in the series, which was put together in collaboration with the organisation Frauentreff Olga, visitors can analyse the role of women in history, their perception within society, and the artistic use of motifs related to women.
In the six themed paths of the project, featuring 62 objects dating from the 4th to the 18th centuries, conceptions about women and the social roles ascribed to them will be placed in their historical contexts and discussed from a 21st-century perspective. The six themed paths can be explored in the museum by way of info-sheets, or online, with the free digital catalogue, available in German and English (PDF, about 2.7 MB). The exhibition catalogue is also available as a print-on-demand publication.
The topics tackled in the exhibition will then be explored in more depth in a series of talks to take place in autumn 2022.
The first instalment in the series, All Forms of Love, was organized together with the Schwules Museum in 2019, and offered a second glance at works that, in a variety of ways, deal with the diversity of sexual identities, their perception, evaluation and artistic processing. The five thematic paths that wind through the entire collection and highlight 33 objects offer insights into the artistic and societal engagement with LGBTIQ* sexualities and identities that have always been present in art, but have often been overlooked or ignored.
In order to make the content of this multi-part exhibition project accessible to all interested parties, the exhibition catalogue is available for download free of charge in both German and English (PDF, each 1 MB). The catalogue provides a much greater depth of background information about the various themes and objects than the project website.
In order to help visitors find their way through the museum, the catalogue features a map showing the location of the objects, with the five routes all colour-coded. The map will also be available free of charge in the museum.
