Exhibition 2x100

Temporary exhibition for the reopening of the National Museum after renovation presents 200 of more than 20 million collection items preserved by the National Museum. It offers the public a very narrow selection of exhibits to give visitors a glimpse into the diversity and complexity of the collections. Many items represent the most rarest of the collections, but also items that have never been exhibited before or newly restored items.
The basic aesthetic principle of the exhibition is simplicity and detail. The exhibition mainly works with the objects themselves and light. In this focus on the objects, it allows them to speak to the visitor without excessive architectural expression. From an architectural perspective, it aims to emphasize the architecture of the museum building and the intermingling of spaces.
Individual exhibits are divided into 11 themes: music, the Middle Ages, gold and gilding, stone and paper, fragile and eternal, close and distant rituals, progress and decline, war and peace, fauna and flora, silver, and the National Museum. In each theme, seemingly unrelated items can be found in a surprising and new context. The installation is vertically organized into clusters according to themes. This method allows the viewer to see all items of a given theme at once, in context, but for the vast majority without the disruptive influence of other motifs.
The items in the 2x100 exhibition are placed in steel cages. This creates a visual screen that evokes a sense of mystery and arouses curiosity. The visitor does not see everything at every moment; the slats (beams) gradually direct their gaze and only reveal part of the view of the clusters of exhibits within the cage. The variant of steel cages was chosen also considering the short assembly time required by the concurrent renovation of the entire building.
The intention of the exhibition is to underline the grandeur of the museum and its collections through the display of its most interesting items in various contexts, thereby reproducing on a small scale the world that the museum has witnessed for 200 years and whose monuments it preserves and stores in memory.