The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (The MoUS) is a temporary fictional museum at TENT that redistributes hierarchies between artwork and the objects that make their presentation possible.

The group exhibition lends its framework from the prologue to the eponymous novel by van Dubravka Ugrešić from 1998. It paints an image of a situation in which a number of objects come together coincidentally due to the healthy appetite of a walrus in a zoo. In the book the objects function as both actors and props: they make the story possible, but simultaneously remain silently present in the background. With this prologue as a point of departure, The MoUS exhibits a diverse collection of artistic practice concerning the language of an exhibition within an institutional context.

Temporary walls, press releases, plants, work descriptions, plinths, projectors and sockets move to the forefront; objects that define the power of expression and the vocabulary of an exhibition yet tend to be invisible to the audience as ‘carriers’ of a work. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender consists of a group exhibition, lectures, a museum night and publication, in which the experience of the exhibited objects to the audience is put to the test. Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk is the 2015 TENT Curatorial Fellow.

The opening of the exhibition takes place on Friday May 1st at 18:00 hrs.