The reopening of the Weltmuseum Wien is accompanied by an innovative book about the Museum. The exhibition Pop-Up World: Narratives turns part of this book into a real-life experience. Sets of several objects are arranged into individual narratives. The range of themes stretches from traditional ethnography to art history, from historical backgrounds of object acquisitions to the beliefs of various world religions, and from collectors and their personalities to the tensions between "us" and "others".

Although rather unusual for an exhibition, the curators also enter the stage as the narrators in film recordings themselves. They tell the stories of their favourite objects, and illustrate their special and often quite personal relationship to these exhibits.

They are all united in the basic intention of the Weltmuseum Wien: to enable visitors to experience the narratives behind the objects and to grant them access to a diverse spectrum of questions that every single object may raise. The Museum does not understand itself as an authoritative institution anymore, as it is impossible to recreate the entire world of an object in encyclopaedic fashion. Instead our house is rather able to provide insights – into the diversity of the world and our relationships to it in the past and present.