A workshop on museum interpretation and exhibition development was held in Jakarta from 23-24 November 2021. The workshop brought together twenty-two (22) participants from fifteen (15) museums from across Indonesia joined the workshop. The trainers were from Deakin University, the Western Australian Museum and Southeast Asia Museum Services, and also included guest speakers from the Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (MACAN) Museum, National Museum of Indonesia, and the University of Indonesia.
In August 2021, an online workshop was held on the significance methodology. As part of that workshop, the Australia-Indonesia Museums (AIM) participants applied the significance approach to five (5) objects from the National Museum of Indonesia and Western Australian Museum (WAM) collections. The ‘Workshop on Museum Interpretation and Exhibition Development’ was built from this first workshop and focused on how to develop an interpretation of museum objects & exhibition planning using the results of the significance assessments.
Overall, the significance and interpretation training workshops are expected to support the work of the AIM participants to identify, research and curate objects from their own collections to be included in a co-curated online exhibition that will be launched in June 2021.
Day one (1) of the workshop focused on the interpretation of objects. This includes an overview of the theory to museum interpretation, audience studies and learning theories, as well as practical training label and text development. In the afternoon the participants visited the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara (MACAN) to learn, and critically examine, how the museum developed its interpretation.
Day two (2) of the workshop focused on the exhibition development process. This included an in-depth exploration of the exhibition development process at the Western Australian Museum (WAM) and an overview of the National Museum of Indonesia’s project to develop new narratives in the museum. Participants developed thematic panels, objects labels and children’s labels, which were then printed and presented in the final session of the workshop to the curators and directors from the National Museum of Indonesia.
The AIM Project is made possible through grant funding from the Australia-Indonesia Institute of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia.