National Museum providing diverse programme in 2017
Scheduled for March is a show dedicated to Slovenian modernist glass design, the world of the samurai will be explored starting May, and ancient European music during the summer.
Freemasonry, allegedly dedicated to improving the world but also accused of orchestrating many a conspiracy in modern history, has been stirring public imagination for centuries.
Due to its specifics, museums and historians were not dealing with the phenomena in a systematic fashion until recently. Upon the 300th anniversary of the movement, the museum will for the very fist time publicly present its entire Freemasonry collection.
The glass design exhibition will celebrate Slovenian glass design, which reached one of its highpoints during modernism.
Between the 1960s and 1980s Slovenian designers set the standards for high quality, innovative and fashionable forms that put the design level on a par with European and global trends.
The exhibition will feature 120 pieces of modernist glass, which is fairly rare in Slovenian museum collections. Having been mostly made for everyday use, a lot of it was broken or got lost.
Meanwhile, Samurai weaponry as well as the entire ethos have become a kind of bridge to Japanese culture for the West.
Honouring this will be an exhibition, also supported by the Japanese Embassy in Slovenia, that will for the first time present around 50 selected pieces of Japanese weapons and armour, coming from the collection of the National Museum of Slovenia and several private collections.
Music will trump weapons between June and September when a multidisciplinary show called Archaeomusica will explore the sounds and music in Europe in periods ranging from the Early Stone Age to Roman and medieval times.
The National Museum is notably also home to a 55,000-year old flute made of a cave-bear bone, discovered at the Divje babe Cave near the Slovenian town of Cerkno (NW) and believed to be the world's oldest musical instrument.