MARJAN UNGER LECTURE 2023

Recent acquisitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London include a pair of camera-enabled sunglasses that mark a step toward ubiquitous computing, a set of posters calling for solidarity with the women’s rights movement in Iran, and a pulse oximeter used to test blood oxygen levels at home. All have been acquired as part of the V&A’s Rapid Response Collecting programme – a model of collecting that through objects seeks to raise questions of globalisation, mass manufacture, demography and the law. Taking Rapid Response Collecting as a starting point, this talk will make a case for designed things and their ability to tell social and political stories and consider what role museums can play in helping navigate the realities of today’s digital age.

CORINNA GARDNER

Corinna Gardner is Senior Curator of Design and Digital at the V&A. Corinna leads the museum’s Rapid Response Collecting programme and her research focuses on product and digital design. Recent projects include development and delivery of the museum’s digital design collecting strategy, a new permanent gallery for twentieth and twenty-first century design and the international touring exhibition Plastics: Remaking our World in collaboration with the Vitra Design, Weil am Rhein.

THE MARJAN UNGER LECTURE

By hosting this lecture the Rijksmuseum honours the legacy of Marjan Unger-de Boer (1946-2018). She and her husband Gerard Unger (1942-2018) donated seven hundred pieces of jewellery to the Rijksmuseum. As an art historian, PhD. and design expert Marjan Unger has written and lectured extensively on jewellery, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Telling stories was her passion. Her knowledge of jewellery, her ability to connect people and institutions and her constant curiosity is both something to remember and to continue by others in the future. In 2017 she published her last book Jewellery Matters together with Rijksmuseum curator Suzanne van Leeuwen. In 2019 her PhD research was translated into English: ‘Jewellery in context: a multidisciplinary framework for the study of jewellery’.

Following the lecture, drinks will be served in the Foyer. You can also visit the ‘Museum Boijmans van Beuningen at Rijksmuseum’ exhibition and 'Perfect day. Mounir Raji photographs tourism' in the Philips Wing.

THANK YOU

The biannual Marjan Unger Lecture is made possible by the Emmel Fonds / Rijksmuseum Fonds.