It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any reader of Orhan Pamuk’s novels that the Turkish writer and artist is a fan of dioramas. These three-dimensional, small-scale stages which one usually encounters in museums or fairs are like magical capsules of moments frozen in time. Yet they are able to transmit and conjure stories much grander than the space they take up. Pamuk—the first (and so far only) Turkish novelist to win a Nobel Prize for Literature—is himself a master of weaving the minutiae of everyday life through objects into his stories. He weaves textual tapestries through the evocative and connotative aura of things. One of his most famous novels, Museum of Innocence (2008), follows a broken-hearted man who puts together a museum dedicated to the thousands of personal effects—matchboxes with restaurant logos, lipstick, ticket stubs—that make up the material residue of a love affair, a shrine to the woman whose affection he can no longer have, in an attempt to allay his pain. Through the author’s textured descriptions, from the protagonist’s point of view, of this cherished collection of bric-a-brac, Pamuk also paints a picture of daily life in Istanbul in the second half of the twentieth century. In 2012, Pamuk opened a museum bearing the novel’s title, its exterior completely painted a dark burgundy and its dimly-lit cavernous interior filled with three-dimensional collages, or dioramas, kept inside rows upon rows of cabinets of curiosity.

This play between the written word and a novel’s physical manifestation in space and time is also at the heart of an art exhibition titled The Consolation of Objects, currently on view at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, Germany. The exhibition is structured along a meandering path, and visitors become immersed in its changing scenery as they move through the space. It begins with some 40 cabinets from the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul that have been recreated for the touring show, wrapping the walls around two corners. Here, we also encounter what Pamuk refers to as “fake ready-mades”—certain products, films, or radio shows that never existed outside of his novel, for which Pamuk created faux ad campaigns. “You read the novel or not, that’s not important,” Pamuk tells me as we walk through the exhibition. “You know that the whole museum is based on a fictional story, and suddenly you are confronted with objects that certainly exist. But they are fabricated by me. I call this confusion a metaphysical dizziness of ambiguity of the ontological nature of objects.” Whether or not all viewers experience this exact sort of confusion Pamuk is describing is beside the point. The objects, arranged as though they were animated and performing a script, still manage to not only evoke lived narratives, but also to console us with the notion of those inner lives’ fullness.

“I have a lot of respect for collectors. In [the novel] Museum of Innocence I argue that people become collectors because there’s a secret wound, a secret trouble that they cannot sate, and they transfer this pain into collecting objects. By nature, I am not a collector but I can understand this urge,” Pamuk elegantly circumvents the question when I ask if there are any specific objects that console him. 

Then, the vitrines housing three-dimensional collages change into new, site-specific dioramas that Pamuk has created in dialogue with works from the museum’s collection. One such work shows Paul Klee’s Erzengel (Archangel, 1938), whose face materialises out of rising and falling lines, or abstracted musical notes, painted against muted colour fields. Pamuk superimposes a drawing over a reproduction of Archangel, interweaving Klee’s lines with Sufi calligraphy to form another face. Islamic Hurufism highlights the mysticism of letters by arranging words to outline figures. In the vitrine Who Comes Out of Me (2024), the sharp-toothed mouth of a hippopotamus is wide open; out of the beast comes a stream of tiny paper figures showing “the people who influenced me most in life,” says Pamuk: “Umberto Eco, my mother, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Karl Marx, Freud, de Beauvoir, Proust, Dostoevsky, my father, an anonymous Turkish woman, Thomas Mann, Pablo Picasso, Italo Calvino ….” The diorama responds to a work by Alfred Kubin from the Lenbachhaus’s collection, titled Das große Maul, (The Big Maw, 1903) which shows the unquestioning masses walking into the behemoth’s mouth. Pamuk reversed this movement, arguing that “art and creativity ought to lead us not into hell but toward the richness of life”.

Turn another corner and the moody path that the dioramas chart opens up to a well-lit exhibition space housing dozens of drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, and a video installation. Here, the viewer encounters Pamuk’s lesser-known side, that of the artist, an observer who is never without a notebook. Pamuk chronicles his everyday experiences, wherever he goes, in dozens of small notebooks, leporellos, and journals which he densely fills with drawings, notes, and doodles. “I am actually a born painter. When I paint I am happy; when I write I’m more controlled and cerebral and nervous. As a result, my writing is more representative, putting a mirror to the world, with a Zola-like ethical responsibility. While as a painter I am only expressing myself. I am private and subjective.”

We look at a series of watercolours he created when he wrote Nights of Plague (2021), a novel which he strangely started before the COVID-19 outbreak. Hung salon style, there are quickly executed watercolours of donkeys, a man walking a dog that curiously has wheels on its legs, women’s hosiery, boys in dark coats and fezzes, a self-portrait. They are based on his research into consumer goods, Sears catalogues and advertisements for major department stores in Paris, London, and New York. This, he divulges, is what writers look at to make sure their descriptions of objects are historically accurate. “I deliberately killed the painter in me and started writing novels,” Pamuk explains. “Because of that, I am a visual novelist. Read a scene by Dostoevsky, it’s so dense, so much talent, but what did you see in the room? Nothing! He is not a descriptive visual writer. Read a scene by Tolstoy, wow, he is making us see pictures. The story unfolds through the pictures. I am more like that.”

The final work in the show is a video triptych by Turkish video artist Ali Kazma, titled A House of Ink, released last year, which deals with Pamuk's literary and artistic work, his studio, his library and his extensive archive. The camera captures him in his studio as he paints, draws, and writes; it follows him around the house as he goes about his day. At one point in this intimate video portrait, we see Pamuk organising his library. He is looking for a novel by the recently deceased Paul Auster, and we learn that his cataloguing system is a combination of chronological and alphabetical order. “The Nabokovs should be here?” Pamuk seems unsure as he talks to a young man who is reorganising with him. “No, Nabokov has his own section.”