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Allegory of the Museum of Fiction

Part 2 Project 2023
Kevin Hwang
University of Sydney | Australia
“The story begins with the Politicians and the Historians announcing the proposal to transform the Registrar General's Building into a Museum of History. As a result, the various creative tenants who worked in the building became furious. The Creatives, frustrated with the obsession with history and museums as the absolute truth, demanded a new civic typology that challenged facts with fiction, absolute with imaginary, and tangible with intangible. The Creatives called it the Museum of Fiction.”

While the term ‘museum’ has been widely known, its form has been perpetually transforming. From the 16th-century ‘wunderkammers’ known as the chamber/cabinet of curiosity to the modernist white cube, the museum has held and exhibited history – history as the truth. However, as Hayden White famously argued, while historians write about factual events and novelists write about fictional events, their inevitable and subjective method of collecting, curating, and writing transforms the work of the historian to be similarly fictional in the ways that make novels fiction.

The following project challenges the notion of history as fact, instead focusing on a history of narrative and imagination. The project is not one of architecture but rather a story that follows the re-imagination of the museum not of history but of fiction.

Kevin Hwang

Tutor(s)

2023
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