Our collection features about 1.5 million artifacts—everyday objects, archives, photos, videos, sculptures, drawings and paintings. In regard to most of these, we know at least roughly what they are, where they come from, who provided them and what they stand for. Indeed, many are queer icons, exhibited and depicted again and again, their stories told and retold. However, there are also quite a few finds that are a mystery to us. We don’t really know what these objects mean or how and why they ended up in the museum—at most we have a vague feeling that they somehow belong here.

In this project, we give a stage to both: some of the lesser-known finds with their never-before-told stories as well as some of our archive’s stars with their all-too-familiar but perhaps incomplete and sometimes distorted stories.

For “Unknown Objects”, we asked ten authors to choose an object from our collection and give it a new story. They could analyze, describe, narrate, sing or talk about the object. The artefacts were also digitalized in 3D, so you can admire them online from all angles. Additionally, the authors Omar Kasmani, Karen-Susan Fessel, Claudia Gülzow, Mino Künze, Traude Bührmann, Sailesh Naidu, Kübra Varol, Pêdra Costa, Kenny Fries, and Romily Alice Walden recorded their texts, and you can listen to them at the same time. You can access the project, curated by Carina Klubauer and Birgit Bosold, here.

Curators: Carina Klugbauer, Birgit Bosold
Webdesign: Roxanne Borloz
Postproduction Audio: Maya Guttmann, Lola Tseytlin
IT: Sebastian Kraus
Translation, Editing: Brier Field, Alexandra Berlina