Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)

SAPHIN AZ-AMAL NAGUIB: Cultural Heritage and its Display

able to provide the average audience with a feeling of permanence and of belongingness to a common past. With the help of carefully selected samples, exhibitions try to recreate a complete picture of this extinct civilization through representation, interpretation and explanation, inasmuch as one cannot reproduce every historical and cultural detail, displays are configurations of spatial and temporal symbols arranged in a fictional setting in order to render where and when certain activities and events took place. The artefacts exhibited define their creators, their consumers and their historical, social and religious contexts even after these have disappeared. Each item is individualized and becomes unique. Moreover, the aesthetics of our time are projected unto it, thus transforming it into an art object. As such it belongs to different times simultaneously, or to use Balmtin's terminology, to macrotime. That is a perception of time where the past, the present and the future interact and are never dissociated from space and context. Alienated from its original context, defunctionalized and elevated to the rank of an art object, the artefact is put on stage and dramatized in various ways. It may be used for different settings to illustrate diverse themes. For example, an ancient Egyptian funerary stela showing a couple seated at a table loaded with food may serve to visualize a certain period and artistic style, types of foodstuff, ancient beliefs about the afterlife or the position of women in ancient Egyptian Picture 3. Différents settings illustrate different themes: Is this Religious belief or Funerary rituals. Musée royal de Mariemont. Photo by CI. Derricks