Cloth room displays fake museum art | city ​​key

A ray disguised as a dragon is one of the objects shown in the special exhibition. (Photo: Public Relations).

Leiden, November 4, 2021, 9:52 pm By Editors

From mid-December, the Musée de Lakenhall will display a special collection in the exhibition “Misleiden – Fakes from art and science.” The museum displays more than twenty pieces with a special story. These are falsifications, mixing or wrong things.

It is not always easy to tell if an art object is real or fake. “Sometimes the desire for the thing to be real takes over: a researcher or enthusiast may have gold in their hands. We want something to be real, even if we can hardly believe our eyes,” the museum said in an explanation for the upcoming exhibition.

Symposium
A seminar will also be held in the run-up to the exhibition. To this end, De Lakenhal has partnered with Studium Generale of Leiden University and ArtScienceWeek. Speakers at the event, titled “More Beautiful Than Truth: Cheating in Word and Image,” also participate in the exhibition.

own forgery
What are the reasons for counterfeiters doing what they do? And if the thing is indistinguishable from the real thing, isn’t that a work of art in itself? These questions are central to the “Disinformed” exhibition, where the Leiden Institutions provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse for researchers and curators. In the gallery, for example, one can admire a ray disguised as a dragon, forged pattern tiles and a very cleverly imitated eye.

cooperation
The exhibition is a private collaboration between nine institutions in Leiden: the objects come from the collections of, among others, the De Lakenhal Museum, the National Archaeological Museum, the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, the Naturalis, the Volkenkunde Museum and the Sieboldhuis. There are also contributions from Leiden University Library, Heritage Leiden, and Environs.

The collaborative project is an initiative of Alexandre Moret for the annual Brave New World conference and Fresco Sam-Sin for the digital platform Things That Talk, who is also a guest curator.

Mislead – Replicas of art and science can be viewed from December 17, 2021 to March 13, 2022 at the Musée De Lakenhal.

Leiden science culture