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What Is Jewellery? Criss-cross through the Jewellery Museum's collections

New presentation of the ethnographic Herion bequest

Since 5 December 2021

There is something innately human about jewellery. The phenomenon of jewellery can be found in all epochs and eras, as well as in all cultures. The ethnographic »Eva and Peter Herion« collection had originally been given to the Jewellery Museum as a permanent loan, and has meanwhile passed into the museum’s ownership. When the remodelled museum opened in 2006, parts of the Herion Collection were set up with a special focus on Africa and Asia. Conceived as a semi-permanent exhibition back then, it is now being redesigned on the basis of a fundamentally new approach. The discussion held in recent years, and increasingly of late, about our approach to ethnographic artefacts requires a new view of non-European jewellery. The Jewellery Museum has therefore embraced a new concept that takes the insights gained from the current discussion and its key aspects into due account. Here it is equally essential to see the objects in their individual cultural-historical contexts, to consider the artistic aspirations involved, and to regard them within the framework of global jewellery history. Their cultural and historical context is as important as the artistic aspirations involved, and they also need to be regarded within the framework of global jewellery history. Objects from all of the museum’s collections, whether from the historical, the modern or the ethnographic collection, will therefore be exhibited in a manner that allows them to enter into dialogue with each other.

To the article "A Wider World" in the blog Bedouin Silver

Parallel exhibition until 6 March 2022
The three jewellery classes at the Vocational College for Design, Jewellery and Utensils at Pforzheim’s Goldsmithing School explored »the phenomenon of jewellery« from several different perspectives. Their jewellery creations were themed around a dialogue of cultures, as well as around the allure of distant places, and the question of what feels foreign and far away to us, yet is so near.