Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi once pointed out how recent art museums by architect Daniel Libeskind allow for altered relationships between exhibitions and visitors. Indeed, when Libeskind’s Jewish Museum Berlin was first opened in a vacant state during the years 1999-2001, the building itself provided the exhibit for initiatory visits. The present study - published as part of a Festschrift for Donald Preziosi on the occasion of his 75th birthday - hightlights the fragmentary process of groundbreaking encounters with this building. The text shows how an embodied and reflexive experience of its architectural interiors and dis-courses go beyond the simplistic symbolism one finds in mainstream interpretations of Libe-skind’s architecture as well as in certain discourses by Libeskind himself. In reality, his ext-ra-functional architecture in Berlin and his early presentations of it constitute a kaleidoscopic field of experience in which critical self-reflexion may occur.
The contribution includes five photographs by the author, four in black/white (1999), one in colors (2009).