Listening and Working Together

From 29 June to 27 August 2009, studioMilou Singapore, in close cooperation with the curatorial team of the National Art Gallery of Singapore, organized a curatorial and exhibition design workshop at studioMilou’s offices in Singapore as part of the work on the new National Art Gallery.

This booklet provides a visual account of the workshop. Members of the studioMilou exhibition-design team were present at each session, providing the minutes and preparing working documents. Some of these documents, together with working drawings and more detailed renderings, are reproduced in the pages that follow.

The workshop offered an ideal opportunity to foster closer relationships between the curatorial team of the National Art Gallery of Singapore and the studioMilou exhibition-design team, and it illustrated two key principles of studioMilou’s work.

The first is the importance of listening carefully to the client and other stakeholders in order fully to appreciate their vision. The second is being able to use this process of listening in order to develop an appropriate design.

Over the workshop’s eight-week period, members of the studioMilou exhibition-design team worked with the curatorial team of the National Art Gallery of Singapore in order to arrive at a joint vision for the exhibition design. Daily meetings, held each afternoon from Monday to Thursday at the practice’s former Supreme Court offices, reviewed studioMilou’s proposed designs, while also providing a space for the discussion of broader museological issues. One week was given over to the use of multimedia technology in an art gallery, while others explored issues of education, public outreach and collection development.

Not just members of the curatorial and exhibition-design teams were invited to attend. Academics, art historians, curators, specialists in education and public outreach, architects, heritage professionals and members of the public were all invited to make contributions to the workshop, the aim being to bring in other perspectives and different ideas from participants from Singapore, the region and beyond. In addition to the workshop’s regular participants from studioMilou and the National Art Gallery of Singapore, over 50 external participants from Singapore, Southeast Asia and Europe also provided valuable contributions to the proceedings.

—–

This work was part of the overall exhibition design work developed by the studio between 2009-2012 for the exhibition of the National Gallery, Singapore; the link below gives a summary of the overall work done for the exhibition:

https://www.studiomilou.sg/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Exhibition_Book-2009-2012_.pdf