Exhibition Visit to… Dansk Design Museum
(Danish Design Museum) in Copenhagen...
At the time of our the visit to the museum - which is located not far from the royal castle of Amalienborg - the temporary exhibition “Mindcraft 15” was on show - apart from the permanent exhibitions of the museum. This award-winning exhibition was the focus of our special interest.
Mindcraft15 is an exhibition designed by the design studio Gamfratesi, which was founded in 2006 by danish architect Stine Gam and italian architect Enrico Fratesi. The studio is based in Copenhagen.
This exhibition was originally exhibited during the Design Week in Milano and was subsequently moved to the Danish Design Museum.
The setting is totally different at the Design Museum and I was interested in how the exhibition idea worked in this entirely different space.
Some of my thoughts on the exhibition design at my visit ranged from;
The good The use of mirrors is a fundamental way of altering the perception of the exhibition space - and it works excellently in this more confined space - more confined as compared to the original one. In fact, the effect on the exhibition experience might be even stronger within the four walls of the gallery. The sense of moving in the middle of a “Display Space” together with the objects heightens your perception and - after your first thought on how an easy effect this is for a spatial manipulation - you realize that this actually gives the exhibited objects a special character of presence. The exhibits are protected not by exhibit cases but by cages which turn into some sort of nests floating in space. Nice way of solving the display situation! The not-so-good I couldn’t help wondering what would’ve happened if you’ve changed the colours of the ceiling and the walls in an effort to make them contribute to the exhibition experience in a more coherent way. I kept thinking when moving about the galleries; “I wonder if they chose to have the walls and the ceiling untouched or if they were’nt allowed to alter them?” What would’ve happened if the ceiling for instance would have been given a brick-red nuance? Would that have been to obvious of an addition? Still, there was something not entirely convincing about how the walls and the ceiling were handled. The overall impression All-in-all I leave the exhibition with a feeling of amazement of how good exhibition design can be made out of very simple means - as long as they’re the right ones for the occasion. Want the visitor to focus on the crafted objects in a space? Well, then, remove any familiar points of reference and let the visitor meet the objects in a space between ceiling and ceiling! Efficient, simple yet powerful.
