Lars Mensel visits a surreal museum for industrial objects…
Vlad Korneev grins when he introduces himself as the Museum Director for the Design Panoptikum. With his piercing blue eyes and thick Russian accent, he is also the founder of this wonderfully obscure venue, and well aware that neither the museum nor its director are what you might expect. “A regular museum is 100% about the museum,” he says. “This one is 50% about the museum and 50% about the visitor.”
The objects in the museum, all collected by Korneev, include an array of medical instruments, machine parts, and antique metal contraptions. Korneev hasn’t just propped them up or mounted them on the walls, he has combined and reassembled many of them in strange, new ways. Just like the torso in the window, his installations often incorporate lights, mannequins and prosthetics.
The more than 3,000 industrial items in the museum therefore beg for closer inspection – but they deliberately lack plaques or explanations. And try as you like, you probably won’t be able to figure out what most of these things are, which is exactly what Korneev intended when he first set up the museum in 2010.
“I want to spark peoples’ interest in reality and give them more motivation to learn about the things surrounding us,” he explains. That mission started some years ago, when he visited a flea market and noticed that visitors were only interested in designer objects, ignoring everything else that was on sale. “The market was closing, and since nobody wanted to buy it, they were giving away an old breathing machine from the 1940s. This didn’t seem normal to me”. It bothered him that people knew more about designer chairs than a machine that had in all likeliness saved thousands of lives.
The Design Panoptikum is his way of raising awareness; a celebration of objects we often fail to notice or even understand. Like the building that houses them, these inventions look unremarkable at first, but Korneev cherishes them for what they do – and for the stories they hold. He thinks that “real life and real history can be much more interesting than all the operas, plays and movies put together”.
“Fantasy and art are very important and they should be in our lives, but the balance is all wrong”, he states. Korneev thinks that our society has become so enamoured with fiction that we overlook the humble nuts and bolts that, quite literally, hold our world together. And that is where you come in as a visitor: “Check your head: 50% of the information in there is information from movies”.
