Essay on Cabinets of Curiosity

This research examines several pieces that will be pointing out and showing their uniqueness in diverse ways which were collected in my collection in the Cabinets of Curiosity in another word in the German language is “Wunderkammer” which is known as the Cabinets of Wonder, mainly the famous collections and objects were located in Europe. As Victoria and Albert Museums (2018) established historians have stated that objects were in the prehistory of modern galleries which aimed to reconsider the vital importance of these pieces and the way they connect. The way of collecting substances has developed and changed from the past till the present and the way people look at things differs from one year to the other.

The Cabinets of Curiosity emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by exploring the European’s bizarre collection that explained and represented the world by using the objects. Subsequently, this method may allow researchers and curators to discover a massive number of artworks that were hidden and not in the widespread collections that were worshipped by various societies. As searching and exploring I found out that Sloane was one of the biggest collectors which is now in the British Museum which was connected to Atlantic slavery, As Delbourgo (2018) at the University of Virginia found that Jamaica is a place that consists of violence and slavery. However, in Western Europe slavery was inherited by the huge colonial empire and as the Britain and Netherlands grew to power there, colonization and the mapping of the world shifted the eyes of people outwards and away from Europe. Collectors were now interested in the exotic nature of artifacts hailing from the unknown, the corners of the world that were still off the edge of the map. Furthermore, the date of birth of Cabinet of Wonders began in the sixteenth century at the homes of royalty and aristocrats who were targeted to compose the world, back then the display technique was exposed in the second half of the sixteenth century. According to Quiccheberg (2003), a complete collection consisted of objects dealing with genealogy, handicrafts dating from antiquity to the present, natural specimens, and technical and cultural objects. As he mentioned about the significance value of collecting objects that were valuable to the social and intellectual sense, many collections were shown to the audience in the society but, the extraordinary one was displayed for the royal occasions only.

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In the past several years, curators have looked at objects in the Cabinets of Curiosity differently by viewing strange objects in one grouped collection and having a glance of modernity, makers in the past were targeted to have and design their world of imagination. Therefore, in the late eighteenth century, they went out of modernity and they couldn’t be a part of modern museums. So, nowadays curators’ point of view has changed with time. For instance, there was a study conducted that collections now seem to be less valuable because many collections are displayed on art scholar websites online which is a lack of sensing the feeling of the items. But while the Wunderkammer made way for the encyclopedic collections of institutions like the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, they also emphasized a myopic European, moneyed perspective, which has only begun to be reassessed in the last several decades Gotthardt (2019).

To begin with, my cabinets of curiosity are different objects that are collected through different trips that I’ve to in my life which are connected emotionally to my heart and globally to each other. The first object is the rounded wood as shown in (Figure 1) that was collected in 2015 at Six Senses Hotel in Oman it has the feeling of roughness and has a light teak wood color, the story behind this object is that my grandmother told me to ask for permission to keep it so she would create a keychain from it as the days past and she diagnosed in breast cancer then she passed away and she couldn’t be able to create what she promised to. So, instead of that, I decided to store it as a memory in my memories collection. The second item was the wooden Holland shoes that have the name “Klompen” (Figure 2) that were collected in 2010 back then I had a trip to the Netherlands to explore new places in Europe and I had a tour of Zaandam village had many small houses that were located in front of the canal, the meaning behind this item is traditional by having something that is a part of other tradition makes me knowledgeable about the outside world and I believe this what makes it distinctive and unique.

In addition, I had these pairs of shoes since I was 9 years old and I always wanted to wear them for daily use when I was a kid they remind me of my childhood. The third item is the Phonograph (Figure 3), which was used for playing music in the past, it was collected on my birthday in 2017 it was a gift from my parents since am the type of person who loves and appreciates collecting vintage items. So, I decided to place it in my cabinet of wonders, and it consists of an old texture and dusty, the wood is carved with old tools and the gold color of the steel is under the process of rust.

The happy doll was chosen for the cabinets of Curiosity's fourth element (Figure 4) which was collected in 2010 it was a gift from my father from the United States of America during his treatment visit there in Ohio, I strongly think that this doll reminds me of horror movies and it's being stored in my storage box because it’s so frustrating and it has strange and unusual colors and doesn’t look like the rest of the collection in my Wunderkammer. Besides, the texture is made of wool and the clothes are out of floral pattern polyester material that is stuffed with cotton whereas, this doll reminds me of the warm days when we were waiting for my father to come from his care trip.

The fifth object is the seashell made out of dried air clay at Zayed University in 2019 as shown in (Figure 5), this object was collected in the art foundations class and created with lots of love and effort during that semester. The steel tea container collected in Turkey is one of their traditional teapots that was used in their everyday routines back then in 2013, it’s made out of steel and it has a few scratches in the middle, this piece is so close to my heart because a young girl that her age was about 8 years old sold this to many people, to have money to be able to live and find herself a shelter. Consequently, the bottle of seawater was collected from Cape Town in 2016 and is considered the seventh item in the collection, the story behind this bottle is that when I went on a trip to Cape Town's most famous ocean that had a blue vividly colored water, it inspired me and gave me a lot of ideas to create in my digital artworks and illustrations. So, then I decided to collect the seawater in a bottle and keep it in my art room to get motivated every time I was depressed and uncomfortable working.

The eighth item is the tiny turtle that was collected back then at the end of 2019 in Victoria Seychelles which was sold in the airport in a souvenir shop and I insisted on having a memory that would remind me of this place. Thus, the rounded-shaped wood that contains a deep hollow carved in the middle of the ninth object was collected in Abu Dhabi in the past in 2018 in a furniture shop I was looking for things that look realistic like a tree wood or a trunk. To, create a unique project that had the title of nature through the years that was talking about the concerns and the main role of the forests and the beauty of mother nature. Although, the last item in my cabinets of curiosity collection is the wooden scoop which was found and collected beside one of the coffee shops in Brussels in 2016 the barista told me to keep it and remember this day as the years pass and the days because he told me that “Days pass by but memories will always be your friend” and I decided to keep it as a gift and a souvenir at the same time.

To conclude, I believe that the idea of working on the cabinets of curiosity should be completed and still be going on by curators and museums till the present and it should be taught to future artists in their career. Since the concept of modernity is changing and developing every year and the way of seeing things is getting different as the art movements get enlarged and open to the global traditions and cultures all over the world. WWunderkammeo'stoggle between nature and art, between the real and the imagined, allowed collectors to present their versions of the world, Gotthardt (2019). Consequently, the aristocracy appreciated and loved to collect extraordinary and strange objects in the cabinets of curiosity.