Welcome to Hope House, a full-scale replica of the Anne Frank House reconstructed within the Kunsthaus Bregenz. A building within a building, a museum within a museum, Hope House takes its inspiration from a of the Anne Frank House the artist bought in the “build your own” model kit* museum gift shop in Amsterdam. In 2017 Simon Fujiwara visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam for the first time. During his tour of the house he learned that while a few original traces of the Frank family remain, most of the interiors of the house had been reconstructed for historical effect. In one instance the architects sourced wallpaper from Communist East German dead stock to match the original. Yet despite its constructed nature, the Anne Frank House continues to hold an authentic emotional power for millions of visitors each year. Unlike the original house, which remains largely empty, Hope House is filled with artworks, objects, furniture and artifacts produced or found by the artist which together hold a mirror to our lives under a new world order: accelerated capitalism. A copy of a copy, Hope House is based on a product sold on the free market and does not present itself as a real architectural experience but investigates some of the many complexities and contradictions of our search for authenticity in a world revolutionized by technology. Simon Fujiwara *The model was created by Dutch designer Wouter Biegelaar.
Welcome to Hope House, a full-scale replica of the Anne Frank House reconstructed within the Kunsthaus Bregenz. A building within a building, a museum within a museum, Hope House takes its inspiration from a “build your own” model kit* of the Anne Frank House the artist bought in the museum gift shop in Amsterdam. In 2017 Simon Fujiwara visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam for the first time. During his tour of the house he learned that while a few original traces of the Frank family remain, most of the interiors of the house had been reconstructed for historical effect. In one instance the architects sourced wallpaper from Communist East German dead stock to match the original. Yet despite its constructed nature, the Anne Frank House continues to hold an authentic emotional power for millions of visitors each year. Unlike the original house, which remains largely empty, Hope House is filled with artworks, objects, furniture and artifacts produced or found by the artist which together hold a mirror to our lives under a new world order: accelerated capitalism. A copy of a copy, Hope House is based on a product sold on the free market and does not present itself as a real architectural experience but investigates some of the many complexities and contradictions of our search for authenticity in a world revolutionized by technology. Simon Fujiwara *The model was created by Dutch designer Wouter Biegelaar.