Odditoreum – room of wonder

This is another photograph from our recently open public display for children, Odditoreum.

Odditoreum with its array of apparently unrelated objects brought together in one space due to their “bizarreness” reminds me of curiosity cabinets so popular among kings, princes, popes and prosperous merchants of the European Renaissance. Curiosity cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries housed indiscriminately both man made and natural items including unique anatomical specimens, mineral samples, artefacts brought from voyages to exotic cultures or novel luxury items. Content of a curiosity cabinet wasn’t divided into separate disciplines. Association between objects was fluid and juxtaposition of the shocking and the beautiful common. This type of collection gradually fell out of favour during the Age of Enlightenment when much more orderly and specialised collections replaced the all-encompassing rooms of wonder.

In the Powerhouse Odditoreumyou will have a chance to look at the weird and wonderful, read the most extraordinary labels written by children’s author and illustrator Shaun Tan and act on your curiosity by creating a bizarre story of your own.

Photography by Paula Bray
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0
Post by Iwona Hetherington, Rights and Permissions Officer