Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence Exhibition at Milan's Bagatti Valsecchi

The Museum of Innocence, a project by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul, 1952), is on display at Milan's Museo Bagatti Valsecchi. The exhibition, curated by Lucia Pini and Laura Lombardi, translates the love story of Kemal and Füsun from Pamuk's novel into 29 display cases, each corresponding to a chapter, filled with objects. The original museum opened in Istanbul in 2012 and won the European Museum of the Year Award in 2014. Unlike previous venues in London and Oslo, the Milanese house-museum is a natural setting because it appears in the novel as one of Kemal's favorite museums, inspiring Pamuk's museological endeavor. The exhibition creates a "museum within a museum," blurring reality and fiction, as visitors follow Kemal's footsteps. Lombardi notes that the project challenges categories and explores relationships between art and reality, artifact and object, true and false, and word, image, and representation.