Tangible

Exhibition design 2024 | Tangible. 80 remarkable objects from the Warsaw Rising for the Warsaw Rising Museum | Team: lead designer Jan Strumiłło, assistant designers Daria Kaczmarczyk, Kacper Borek, Helena Wierzbowska, Adrianna Manista | The exhibition will remain on show between July 31st 2024 and June 9th 2025 | Photography by Jędrzej Sokołowski

The exhibition follows the drama of Warsaw Rising along a series of eighty objects grouped in a sequence of feelings. Each of the unique items tells an extraordinary story. The relics, carefully selected from the museum collection, vary in shape and size. Their descriptions based on detailed memories from the Museum’s vast repository form the essence of the narrative.
In order to convey the objects’ special emotional value, often contrasting with their small dimensions and overall plainness, we proposed framing them within niches. Intense light makes them stand out against dark background. We sought out a family of forms to lead the viewer through the long linear exhibition space and to unify the heterogenous collection. The niches are concave revolved surfaces based on superelliptic curves. Their internal surfaces were deliberately left rough to provide a lively backdrop for the objects. Seating and pedestals were conceived as convex counterparts to the niches.
Designing this scenography was an exercise in resource management as well as in technological improvisation. We used existing display cases  completely transforming them to fit our needs, including setting them in a new layout, changing their colour, introducing a new internal lighting system and inventing an experimental method of rapidly producing curved shells in many sizes. Gallery walls and display cases were all painted dark green – a special tone also present in many of the large-scale colorized photographs presented in the exhibition. During the production of the many all-important texts we took special effort to make them compatible with the exhibition catalogue. We achieved this by selectively applying the specific typeface sampled from the publication to highlight the ’emotional code’ keywords organizing the objects’ order and sequence.