Landmarks of Jewish History

At the Altonaer Museum in Hamburg, gewerkdesign designed the exhibition space »Landmarks of Jewish History«. Working closely with the curators, we developed a spatial concept that can be continuously adapted. The exhibition presents, in condensed form, 400 years of Jewish history in Altona and Hamburg, a history characterised by diversity and internationalism.

The most striking feature of our exhibition design is an open wall installation that wraps around the room on all four walls. It consists of hundreds of vertical strips in various colours from an aesthetically harmonious palette and evokes the image of a timeline. The strips hang close together and in several layers one in front of the other, slightly adding a visual sense of depth to the small space. The spatial image that emerges represents the complexity of the events. The events are grouped around 14 selected milestones in Jewish history in Hamburg and can be read on specially designed, movable plaques and viewed in photographs. To emphasise the temporal aspect even more strongly, the milestones on the orange strips also feature the dates, according to both the Jewish and Gregorian calendars.

Visitors enter the exhibition space via a corridor designed as a prologue. There stands a large historical display cabinet. In the project space, museum-style glass display cases and other exhibition structures are either integrated into the timeline or stand freely within the room. The exhibits housed within them are always positioned in relation to the milestones and engage in a dialogue with them. To enable visitors to settle down and view the space as a whole, with all its contents, or to focus on a specific area, we have designed benches. Their seats are woven from the same strips of material used to create the timeline. At audio stations, the complex and often difficult provenance stories of four objects are presented in a narrative format.