All clear? Glass and death

Glass is a fascinating material. Glass is universal and commonplace. It is durable, transparent, reflective, and can sparkle. Glass is translucent, but also opaque. Glass is surprisingly versatile, fragile, and bizarre. Glass makes preservation for earthly eternity possible and is simultaneously a symbol of the transcendent. Glass is also an inexpensive material for imitating precious things. The exhibition took the inherent fascination of glass as an opportunity to explore this material within its own collection. Due to the wide range of attributed properties and its diverse symbolism, glass also finds multifaceted use in funeral and mourning culture. In this special exhibition, the Museum of Sepulchral Culture presented glass objects and items with glass appliqués that allude to historical phenomena and current trends in sepulchral culture. On display were: pearl wreaths, funeral crowns, urns, jewelry and room memorials, but also grave markers or a 150-year-old ornate hearse, right up to memorial crystals in which traces of the deceased are fused.

Like almost no other material, glass is linked to ideas about the world of the dead. Derived from the Middle High German word "glanst," meaning 'shining' or 'gleaming,' it seems natural that Christianity conceived of the light-filled heavens as a sea of ​​glass and, within the context of the creation story, depicted God holding a transparent glass sphere—the symbol of the world of light he created. In Norse mythology, the realms of the blessed or the dead are often described as a glass mountain. Its steep and smooth slopes are insurmountable for mortals. Here, glass irrevocably separates the living from the dead. And some people are convinced that by moving a glass filled with spring water, they can make contact with spirits and powers of the afterlife.

The opening featured the musical piece "The Thought Before the Last Thought" by GlasKlang – Olaf Pyras and Marcel Quappen.