A feeling of disquiet arises from its nonchalent co-option of the associations of authenticity exuded by the model Museum it uses its tropes and iconographies to turn fiction into fact (or, more accurately, the kind of fact inevitably distorted by exhibition, to which most museum material is subject). The structure of time is rendered ambiguous: Pamuk creates a past for a present that never existed. The Museum of Innocence, on the contrary, is a museum that makes manifest fiction and imagination. The museum disrupts the implicit assumption we make as visitors to institutions such as these, which lies in the inviolability of the museum’s relationship to ‘reality’, to a history that happened, somewhere, once – to ‘truth’, of some kind.

Pinned to a wall like ten thousand twisted butterflies, an overwhelming display of lipsticked filters. As you enter, the first wall you encounter is dedicated to the butts of the 4213 cigarettes smoked by Fusun. The novel even contains a printed ticket that grants entry to its museum-proper. In 2012, Pamuk opened an actual Museum of Innocence in Beyoglu, Istanbul – in a building precisely as described in the novel – filled with the objects that feature in the text, from a quince grater (notable subject of a particular chapter) to handbags, ashtrays and a child’s tricycle. These talismans of their short-lived affair keep his passion alive, and on the death of her parents he buys the house she grew up in, transforming it into a museum of their love, creating a home for his collection. Set in Istanbul from 1975 to today, the story is woven from memories catalysed by objects that Kemal, the protagonist, has taken or stolen from Fusun, his love. In 2008 Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk published his novel The Museum of Innocence. It has been developed out of workshops with Brian Kuan Wood, one of the editors of e-flux, and I am also on the editorial board.

This is a text being developed for submission to a publication associated with the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, this year.

Orhan pamuk museum of innocence