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Exhibition Critique Assignment

Bhawika Mishra

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Exhibition’s client, content, target audience(s)

Client: Ministry of Culture (Taiwan) and Taipei Cultural Center in New York.

Content: The exhibition Measure Your Existence questions and expands the Buddhist concept of impermanence through artworks by six contemporary artists who explore duration, survival, memory, fate, history, loss, disappearance, and reappearance. The fleeting, impermanent here and now—in all its destruction, regeneration, and intense immediacy—is the ultimate reality.

Drawing on a diverse range of sources and perspectives—from contemporary art to scientific theories to Buddhist philosophies—the Rubin will explore the freedom and ease that comes from letting go of expectations and consciously living in the present.

Target Audience: Families, Adults., Teens, K-12 Educators, University Faculty & Students

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About the Museum

CORE VALUES�ACCESS : Visitors are at our core. We share with all communities our collection and broadly conceived exhibitions as a catalyst for dialogues about art and culture.

ENGAGEMENT : We believe in taking an open and active approach to engaging learners at all levels and helping them to understand our world. We do this by encouraging deep connections and transformational experiences in a welcoming, enjoyable, and beautiful environment.

CREATIVITY : We encourage creativity, innovation, and risk-taking, as well as excellence, transparency, and collegiality in all that we do.

SCHOLARSHIP : As stewards of an increasingly significant collection of art from Himalayan regions, we are dedicated to its preservation, display, and study and to advance this field of art and cultural understanding.

MISSION

The Rubin Museum of Art is a dynamic environment that stimulates learning, promotes understanding, and inspires personal connections to the ideas, cultures, and art of Himalayan regions.

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BIG IDEA IMPERMANENCE

“Impermanence does not necessarily lead to suffering. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

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Measure Your Existence

Measure Your Existence has officially opened at the Rubin Museum featuring six contemporary artists addressing the fleeting nature of existence through performance, installation, film, sculpture, and photography. Each artist questions and expands the Buddhist concept of impermanence through artworks that explore duration, survival, memory, fate, history, loss, disappearance, and reappearance.

Guest curator Christine Starkman runs through the artworks in the show and their themes as related to impermanence, interaction, and the passing of time.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Placebo) (1991)

Tehching Hsieh’s “One Year Performance” (1980–81)

Lee Mingwei’s “The Letter Writing Project” (1998)

Taryn Simon’s “A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–IVIII” (2008–11)

Shilpa Gupta’s “1:14:19 / 1188.5 Miles of Fenced Border

Meiro Koizumi’s “My Voice Would Reach You” (2009)

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Visitor Experience/ Audience Engagement

The online exhibit is maximised by integrating different media in the website. It is integrated with various other social media platform like the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram , Issue, IGTV to keep the visitors informed at every platform and be more approachable.

Visitors participate, and intimately experience works of art through audio tours, videos, live stream and lot of other resources. The exhibition creates ephemeral moments of reflection and meaning, inspiring personal recollection and reminiscence.

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Emotive/affective intentions

Exploration

Seeking

Learning/ Engaging

Reflecting

Sharing

Reminiscence

Visitor Experience/ Audience Engagement

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Extended Experience

The Rubin Museum of Art’s annual Brainwave series explores the connections between the Buddhist idea of impermanence, or that everything changes, and cutting-edge research in neuroplasticity. Brainwave program investigates how our minds shape our everyday experiences by combining the most compelling advancements in science with traditional Himalayan wisdom.

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DESIGN ELEMENTS

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TYPE

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COLOR PALETTE

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Online Shop

Social Media

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DIGITAL RESOURCES

The rubin Museum of art produces many resources to foster a deeper experience with the art of the himalayas, available both in their galleries and online.

MEDIA CENTER: Rubin Experience, Exhibition Related, THe Rubin Daily Offering, Talks, Mindfulness Meditation Podcast, Audio Tours

DIGITAL RUBIN CARE PACKAGE

ART AND PRACTICES FOR NAVIGATING OUR WORLD

Learn to Harness your Emotion - Blog Posts Share Techniques for quieting the mind and managing anxiety

Control Your Breath- Meditations designed to focus the mind and control the breath

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Exhibition Strength

  • The exhibition website is ADA compliant. It has verbal description and offers high contrast with its color palette and makes it easy for people who are blind or partially blind.

  • The exhibition engages the visitor as it draws from a diverse range of sources and perspectives from contemporary art to scientific theories to Buddhist philosophies providing a plenty of options for the different visitor type to explore as they please.

  • It follows a hierarchy in display of content and familiarize the visitor with what they are going to see next.

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Exhibition Weakness

  • Despite the fact that the exhibition provides a lot of resources to dive deeper into the subject of impermanence, it fails to fully translate the materiality and the display of curated installations and artwork.

  • At various places the visitor tend to get stuck because multiple links point to the same resource.

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Suggestions for Improvement

  • On the home page, making the flow of images either horizontal or vertical to keep the visitor at ease.
  • The exhibit utilised a lot of media but it would have been great to use panoramic view pictures or 360 degree view or virtual; view of the space.
  • Live Feeds with the artist whose work have been displayed and giving visitors the chance to interact with them.

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Thank You