On my recent trip to Hobart I took in the recently refurbished Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Overall I was impressed, but now it’s a couple of months later I think the thing that sticks in my mind the most is an exhibit on the top floor of the refurbished Bond Store building – the Parrawa, Parrawa! exhibition. This deals with the European invasion of lutruwita (Tasmania) and the resulting war between 1823 and 1831.
The space is fairly understated in its design and is reasonably sparse with respect to density of exhibits (I mean this in a good, less is more sort of way).
The exhibit I spent the most time at was a set of paired projections – on opposite sides of the gallery from one another – one telling stories of battles from a European perspective and the other from an Aboriginal perspective. It’s hard to capture in images but here’s a few examples:
This short video clip (15 secs) might give a better idea of the juxtapostion of the screens within the gallery. I took the video from a bench that was positioned offset from but between the two screens. I sat there for a while alongside a fellow visitor, while we periodically turned our heads from side to side to see the two screens, as they are both screening simultaneously (I mused that we might have looked like spectators at a tennis match, although we weren’t always moving in sync with one another!).
It’s interesting for me to reflect on this experience from both the perspective of a visitor and a former exhibition designer. Had I been on the design team for this exhibition, I can imagine that I may well have argued against this positioning of the screens such that you had to keep turning your head to follow them both. However, I would have been proven wrong as I think in this instance it actually works.
For a start, it positions the two opposing views as more clearly “facing off” against one another. It’s hard to see both perspectives at once (which mirrors the intellectual concept of the exhibit nicely – war is often about ‘taking sides’ whether you want to or not). Also, the provision of a bench makes all the difference – it signals a vantage point from which you can view both screens without obstructing others. And viewing them seated also allows a more reflective engagement with the content. I overheard one visitor say to her companion that “it’s hard to look at*, but that’s good because it makes you want to watch it again.”
This would be an fascinating exhibit to observe visitors at – once visitors did engage with it, they did seem to spend a fair bit of time at it. But if you breezed past, you may not necessarily have “got” what the exhibit was all about – it could have looked like two disconnected screens depending on what was going on when you walked past. I wonder how these different levels of engagement would look over an extended period of time – over to you, TMAG!
* From the context it was clear she meant physically difficult, not ‘hard’ as in the ‘hot’ nature of the subject matter – although that may also apply in this instance.
How compelling to have two pieces purposefully in competition with one another. So often it’s unintentional (and detrimental).
Was there one audio track for the entire space, or competing sounds from each side?
My best recollection is that the soundtrack was more ambient in nature and covering both screens – there definitely wasn’t the sense of two soundtracks competing with each other. Also in many instances the same audio effects would have been applicable for both scenes, which were depicting the same event from two different perspectives (gunfire, etc.)
Thanks for your positive comments on the Parrawa exhibition, Regan. You are correct in remembering that the sound track covers both films which work together in tandem. There is ambient music/soundscape as well as other voices and sound effects which relate to particular sequences. These all relate to what is occurring on both screens. We talked a lot about how to position the films which we regarded as the key to the exhibition. We always wanted them to screen opposite each other, although not so much to compete with each other but, as you realised, to tell the story from opposite viewpoints. Not all visitors ‘get it’ – ie that the screens have different and connected footage, but my observation of how most interact with teh gallery suggests that most do, or they realise it after a while. That isn’t a problem for me – the slow dawning realisation that history has more than one viewpoint, I think, is a valid and powerful response to such a story. Also I think that the ‘tennis match’ nature of looking from one screen to the other adds to the emotional tension and sense of anxiety and dislocation which we sought and was created so well by the film-makers.
Thanks for the input Ian. Reflecting on this exhibit again, it occurs to me that the screens are an interesting case study in “synchronous channelling” (http://reganforrest.com/2013/08/museum-visitor-experiences-part-3-channelling/), at least for those visitors who take the time to see it unfold.