The light and shade of German science

摘要

The first image to confront visitors to the Weltwissen exhibition in Berlins Martin Gropius Bau is formed of shadows. Silhouettes of 250 historical objects in 96 giant shelving cubes are projected using bright lighting onto a vast canvas that backs the two-sided display, filling the atrium. The items - ranging from statues of Greek philosophers to skeletons and an iron lung - were selected from local museums by New York artist Mark Dion as 'witnesses' of Berlins scientific past.rnThe display is a neat metaphor for the light and shadow of Berlin's 300-year scientific history, reflected in this ambitious show. The city was home to some of Europe's most important science before the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the physical destruction of the city in the Second World War and the 1949 rise of the Berlin Wall.