The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (The MoUS) was a temporary and fictional museum in TENT that rearranged the hierarchy between the artwork and the objects that make their presentation possible. The project was curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, TENT Curatorial Fellow 2015.
The group exhibition took its framework from the prologue of the eponymous 1998 book by Dubravka Ugrešić. It describes a situation in which a number of objects come together by chance, thanks to the healthy appetite of a walrus in a zoo. In the book, the objects function as actors and props: they make the story possible, but at the same time they are silently present in the background. With this prologue as a starting point, The MoUS showed a diverse collection of artistic practices around the language of an exhibition within an institutional context.
Temporary walls, press releases, plants, room texts, plinths, projectors and plugs came to the fore — objects that actually determine the expressive power and vocabulary of an exhibition but usually remain invisible to visitors as 'carriers' or 'supporters' of a work.
The MuOS consisted of a group exhibition, lectures, a museum night and a publication, in which the visitor's experience of the objects on display is put to the test.