On Monday, 20 July 2026, Prof. Dr. Beate Fricke, Dr. Sasha Rossman and MA Jakob Weber (University of Bern, Switzerland) will give a guest lecture entitled “Gaps and Nonlinear-Storytelling in the Virtual Exhibition ‘Loot and Legend’”. The lecture will take place from 4.15 pm to 6.30 pm in the Philosophikum (Domplatz 23, 48143 Münster), Room 201.
In their talk, they will present the virtual exhibition, part of the SNF project “The Inheritance of Looting. From Medieval Trophies to Modern Museums”, which will “open” on 1 December 2026. Beate Fricke, Sasha Rossman and Jakob Weber have developed this exhibition in collaboration with Susan Marti (Bern Historical Museum) and the team of Jimmy Schmid (Communication Design/HKB Bern), Boris Müller (Interface Design/UCLAB) and Studio Nand. Innovative elements of the exhibition will include the visual design, the emphasis on gaps in the archives, and the use of non-linear storytelling. The 144 individual stories from the ‘lives’ of the eight objects are not arranged linearly, but can be freely explored in four thematic clusters: utilise, dispense, glorify, reproduce. Each visit to the exhibition constructs a new story. The gaps remain visible. For cultural heritage does not simply arise – it is made. The exhibition invites visitors to follow this narrative and question it.
Prof. Dr. Beate Fricke, before joining the University of Bern (Switzerland) in 2017, was Professor for Medieval Art at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2024/25 she was Slade Lecturer at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on art, ars, and craft, on objects as archives, on materiality, knowledge transfer and trade in the global “Middle Ages”. She is founder of the journal 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual.
Dr. Sasha Rossman is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Art History, University of Bern in the SNF-funded project “The Inheritance of Looting: Medieval Trophies to Modern Museums”. His monograph “On the Table in Early Modern Europe: Person, Place, and Politics 1560-1700” is forthcoming with Brill. He is also the author (with Andrew Sears) of “Verschollenes Erbe: das Juwel ‚Drei Brüder‘ von Burgund” (Vexer Publishing House).
MA Jakob Weber is a PhD student at the Institute of Art History, University of Bern. His research focuses on the material culture of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, with a particular emphasis on war booty in triumphal display and collecting. He traces object relations, practices, and transformations until the turn of the 18th century. “Raub und Ruhm” 2026 is the second interdisciplinary digital exhibition he co-curates after “Curiositas 5.0” 2022.