This exhibition on 400 years of Archbishopry in Mechelen doesn’t confine itself to a historical reconstruction of its own topic. Instead, a boulemic collection of artifacts, often striking in their awkwardness, is used to hint at a story of organized religion intertwined with organic spirituality.
This most abstract of themes is gradually decipherable through an exhibition layout which focuses on the materiality of the artifacts and the surprising narrations that emerge from their constellations.
In a contrast-plenty sequence of small passages and niches, themes and subplots are laid out: the immersion room, the bright archbishops’ gallery, the suggestive passage on clergy culture, the confronting mass manifestations, the incarnations of Good and Evil.
