This year marks the 50th anniversary of the events of 1968. The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (MKG) in Hamburg is taking this milestone as an opportunity to recall the values of the movements that emerged at the time and to “consolidate them once again in our collective memory”.
Through around 200 objects, the “68. Pop and Protest” exhibition makes it possible to understand what moved people at that time and how the desire for freedom, equality, peace, and tolerance was expressed. The scope of the exhibition covers everything from music and film to fashion and product design to advertising and posters. Here is how rock music became a phenomenon that shaped a generation, whose attitude to life resonated around the world; a young generation of filmmakers broke away from traditional genres and the student and civil rights movements created countless posters which people used for their protests on the streets. The revolutionary currents quickly found their way into the mainstream and shaped popular culture, so that the desire for a new way of dealing with physicality and sexuality, consumer freedom, and new paradigms in design – fuelled by cross-media advertising – was also reflected in material culture. An example of this is the Spiegel canteen, which Verner Panton completed for the publishing house of the same name in 1969 and donated to the MKG in 2012, and is now the centrepiece of the exhibition.
