Writer Orhan Pamuk Presenting the Museum of Innocence | Louisiana Channel

“A tribute to the unimportant daily life objects and their valuable meaning for our memory and connection with time lost.” Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk delves into the deeply personal and intricate world of his Museum of Innocence, both the novel he published in 2008 and the museum he opened in Istanbul in 2012.

Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk shows us around his Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. It is a physical manifestation of his protagonist Kemal’s unfulfilled love and longing, embodied in everyday objects meticulously collected and a personal reflection of life in Istanbul in the late 20th century.

Orhan Pamuk originally wanted to be a painter but failed, he says. Instead, at the age of mid-forties, he realized that he “wanted to create an artwork combined with literature, and this is my first attempt at combining the two."
Pamuk began collecting everyday objects for the museum and writing the novel at the same time, the objects inspired the novel and vice versa: “It's not that I had a collection, then I thought about a home for my collection. I collected and wrote and wrote and collected.”

When planning the museum, Orhan Pamuk wanted the visitors who had not read the novel to “have a sense of the quality of the surface of the objects, the texture of life of Istanbul between 1970s and early 2000s, and also the visual atmosphere of Istanbul.” Pamuk did not write for six months but was busy composing one by one glass vitrines, boxes, and units in the manner of Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Juan Gris: “This museum is based on the things that this generation of surrealistic artists developed with the concept of ready-mades.”

Throughout the interview, Pamuk reveals his lifelong fascination with objects as vessels of memory and nostalgia. “Objects have the power to trigger our memories,” he notes, comparing his work to Marcel Proust’s exploration of involuntary memory. He believes that even the smallest items have the power to transport us back in time: “A movie ticket found in a jacket can be the only reason you remember the film 20 years later”, Pamuk reflects, highlighting the profound relationship between memory and material objects.

At the museum, Orhan Pamuk’s manifesto for museums is written as he believes, he says, that museums “should not be a safe or heaven for precious things only. The museum should honor the objects of daily. Museums should not only dramatize the history of a nation, or a group, or a gender, or a Chinese army but should also go and explore the dramas of individual beings.” Pamuk argues that “the future of museums should be inside our own personal homes.”

Orhan Pamuk concludes: “I am inviting you to a new artificial space which will envelop you and will make you ask questions about being, time, remembering attachment, love, jealousy, anger, and these objects are there to generate these things or make you ask these questions about your life”.

Orhan Pamuk, born in Istanbul in 1952, is one of Turkey's most acclaimed writers. Known for novels like My Name is Red, Snow, and Istanbul: Memories and the City, his work examines themes of identity, memory, and the cultural tensions between East and West. In 2006, Pamuk received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his contributions to world literature.

Orhan Pamuk was interviewed by Christian Lund in Istanbul in September 2024.

Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard
Edited by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2024

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