February 25 – April 15

A Museum of Infinite Possibilities

“I am familiar with the surface of things…Fraying, tattered, cracked, flattened, swollen, dried, scrawny, bristling, moldy, clenched, tangled, punctured, battered, bashed-in, scooped-out, withered, engorged, trampled, toppled, crushed, bald, listing, leaning, twisting hanging, buried, wedged, jammed, impaled, straggling, stretched, disjointed, disembowled, skinned, docked, gnawed, entrenched.” (Rosamond Purcell, Owl’s Head: On the Nature of Lost Things, Quantuck Lane Press, NY, NY, 2003, p. 29)

Inspired by Rosamond Purcell’s imagined museums, the ICI is opening the drawers to its Ephemera Kabinett and inviting the public to unleash its many secrets.

Museum of Obsolete Tools
Museum of Wires
Museum of the Croquet and Musket Ball
Museum of Natural Disasters
Museum of Ruined Landscapes
Museum of Failed Attempts
Museum of Filthy Mail
Museum of Bisected Objects
Museum of Corrosion

Visitors will have the opportunity to suggest new categories for the ICI’s Ephemera Kabinett database (“fraying, moldy, trampled, skinned, withered”) as they re-arrange objects from the archive into ever-changing, new ‘museum collections.’

February 25 – April 7

Museophilia

Books from the ICI Library embrace and interrogate Donald Preziosi’s belief that the “Museum” is one of ‘the great technologies of the enlightenment,’ where it reigned as a reflection of the philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic discourses that surrounded it.

Also on display are some of the micro museums in the ICI’s collection.