The Eroticism of Things

A pocket watch with a secret rear chamber, a wooden dough scraper, a shiny leather boot, a fresh bread roll – even before Freud, people were attributing erotic qualities to things.

“The Eroticism of Things: Collections on the History of Sexuality” traces the material and immaterial production of eroticism. Shape and color, purpose and use, implicit allusions, and explicit renderings all make things the stuff of erotic fantasies while also making them eloquent documents for a cultural history of sexuality.

Using examples culled from the collections of sexologists Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey, as well as from Naomi Wilzig’s art collection, the exhibition sheds light on differing natures of and intents in collecting, classifying, presenting, and interpreting erotic things. The show asks what distinguishes eroticism, sexuality, and pornography from each other, how erotic objects reinforce or question gender relations, and how the everyday use of things can even turn killers of love into agents of love.

The exhibition shows all kinds of different erotic relationships people can enter into with things and treats the eroticization of things as a cultural practice that can play out either implicitly or explicitly, in the imagination or in deed, alone or between two or more people. Certain objects can kindle desire and lust, provoke erotic fantasies, and become tools of pleasure, as an installation by the artist Marc Martin also shows. This is a joint exhibition by the Research Center for the Cultural History of Sexuality at Humboldt University, Berlin and the Museum der Dinge (Museum of Things). Produced in collaboration with WEAM and the Kinsey Institute