“If you are planning to tour, you should decide that from the beginning – looking to change from an in-house to a touring display will always cost you money,” says Charlotte Dew, a researcher from the Touring Exhibition Group (TEG).
“As a sector, we routinely [underestimate] the amount of staff,
time and money that touring takes," she adds.
There are some crucial design considerations to take into account. “The key is flexibility,” says Aisha Burtenshaw, chief registrar and head of touring exhibitions at Oxford’s Ashmolean.
“Usually we display here at the Ashmolean first, so the museum conceives the idea for us first. But we build in a section of flexibility; for example additional text panels for smaller spaces.”
She adds that the majority of costs are factored into the original display, but that there “maybe a few hundred pounds” for things like extra display panels.
Design considerations differ significantly for the presentation of 2D and 3D objects, and, therefore it’s important to have a full dress rehearsal of any display.
Interpretation is a crucial element of touring and, increasingly, part of the package. This has the added bonus of consistency for the recipient and brand extension for the museum or gallery that devised the display.
“What we are finding is that people are supplying that as a package that can be tailored, particularly in a digital environment,” explains Dew.
“The V&A, for example, gives objects with a disk of interpretation.”
However this is not without its pitfalls. “The flip side is that in a more brand-savvy environment there is a lot of push and pull – you have the potential for two sets of brand guidelines clashing,” she adds.
Birmingham Museums has seen both sides of this coin. Exhibitions officer Katie Hall agrees that if an exhibition comes with a set of interpretation it needs to be kept.
“It’s important as a receiving venue to find out what these preferences are very early on,” she adds.
However there is more leeway with projects such as the Photorealism exhibition from Germany’s Institute of Cultural Exchange. “Their touring package is essentially the objects themselves,” says Hall.
“We were able to play around with it and really go bold.” To this end the design took inspiration from 1960s America, depicted in many of the show’s images. The signage was red with metallic lettering, which became a unique trademark of the Birmingham Museums’ display.
Hall is another great advocate of flexibility when it comes to design for touring exhibitions. This proved important for a recent collaboration with Ryan Gander for Night in the Museum in the Gas Hall at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG).
“Although the layout was planned on paper in advance with both partners, there were still some changes made once we were all able to see the works in the space,” she recalls.
“We were able to add in eight works from our collection, selected by Ryan, which is something we’re always keen to do where possible and gives the exhibition at our venue a unique twist. We also added to the Resource Area to make sure we catered to our target audiences.”
This exhibition was designed in such a way that it worked with grand Edwardian civic interior as eaily as the large ‘white cube’ space at the Longside Gallery in Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
The most successful touring exhibitions will have blockbuster appeal but also the ability to be scaled down to fit smaller venues. Having been adapted for three small venues the National Museums Scotland’s Fossil Hunters closed in Edinburgh in August and reaches Stornoway in April. Ten display cases were reduced to four by NMS designers; and staff then visited the recipient museums to work out the practicalities and install the accompanying films and interactive games.
“We are particularly good at making our exhibitions accessible for a wide variety of ages and sites because we have really strict guidelines that we always adhere to,” says Alanna Davidson, the touring exhibitions manager at NMS.
“Smaller museums quite like to see our standards of design and if they can deliver an NMS exhibition, I think it feels like they have added value as well,” she adds.
Getting a big name exhibition can also be a valuable learning process for the recipient museum’s staff and often inspires them to venture into the world of touring exhibitions.
