The Storeroom as Promise inquires into the value of museum collections and stores for today’s museums. It focuses on a variety of museums with differing specialisations, all of which explicitly make their stores a central theme in their exhibitions. Using a cultural studies approach, it seeks to fathom what makes the store so attractive for the museum today – as metaphor, method or place. What ideas about the store and collection do these exhibitions transmit? And how does the process of translation from stored object to exhibited object take shape?