Local Collection
From the Rimon Collection, Haifa City Museum
Curator: Inbar Dror Lax
The role of museums, by definition, is to hold and cultivate collections that contain culturally valuable, authentic items. Action taken to preserve and expand such collections is an important criterion for assessing a museum's contribution. The museum collection contains items intended to establish an ideology or an idea by means of a policy that is reflected in the choice of objects, in their manner of display, and in the presentation of cultural contexts. The character of the collection, as a quintessential ideological instrument, is determined in the course of preservation, restoration, and renovation activities. The museum is a sort of "gatekeeper," an institution that decides who and what are worthy of entering history.
As an accumulation of personal passions and choices, the private collection presents an interesting alternative to the public one. The collector determines the rules, the hierarchy, and the meaning of his or her objects. The private collection, as a kind of living organism, reflects the inner order of the collector's psyche. The collection's dismantling and acquisition by the museum is like a rebirth, with its items now presented to the public following the work of researchers and curators.
The current exhibition examines different ways of classifying and constructing a historical collection, and the differing interpretations of the field's leading "actors": the collector, the curator, and the historian. It reflects different ways of presenting and interpreting a collection: scientific means of classification and cataloguing ("typology"), a theme-oriented division into meta-categories, interpretations that rely on an academic approach or on non-theoretical writing, and more. These interpretations represent a multiplicity of views of the "historical truth