Review: Future Exhibitions

Future Exhibitions is a “publication searching the world for signs of what is to come”. Bilingual Swedish/English, it’s focused on the museum and exhibit world, while also nodding at the influence of digital on how exhibits may evolve.

It’s a creation of The Swedish Travelling Exhibitions, a group very much involved in making interesting projects happen themselves, partnering with government bodies, museums and others.

Future Exhibitions is about highlighting the current fringes of museum innovation, and how the internet has changed what people, especially young people, want to get out of physical exhibition spaces. It’s a topic that interests me greatly, as one of my other hats is as a co-founder of a group called The Museum On Site, and we grapple with similar issues ourselves. Not to mention Colophon, of course.

The magazine is gluebound, with cloth over the spine and a thick, card cover glued on top; its logo is made up of letters from the typography used in the magazine’s headlines – which are all Creative Commons-licensed fonts from FontStruct.

While some of the headline fonts look a little amateur, the design is clean and clear, with good use of what looks like two extra inks. The paper is good and thick, 115g with a matt finish. It feels like a nice object to read, with the right mix of seriousness and energy for the theme. At 144 pages, it feels like there’s plenty to enjoy.

The content is divided into Trendsetters, Oracle and some general pieces. The articles namecheck what seems to be a good mix of of the established – Tate, Smithsonian, Moma, Wellcome Collection – and the little known – MU, Red Location, Newark Museum. Writers seems to be based all over the world, albeit with most of them being from Sweden.

The magazine has lofty goals and has found a decent format from which to attack them. The problem is that the content just isn’t compelling; articles lack depth and analysis, being almost entirely positive and reverential about their subjects.

Pretty much all the articles also lack much context, which makes me wonder who the magazine is aimed at – interested museum visitors, or museum professionals? For the former, more context and explanation would be needed; for the latter, much more analysis and questioning is required. Can anyone really write about a project in Second Life without questioning who is actually going to visit it? Doesn’t anyone have anything negative to say about the millions spent on the Newseum’s technology, visitor numbers for which have been disappointingly low?

Often, Future Exhibitions seems to ask the right questions – What is inspiring us? Who will staff the galleries? How can museums show greater environmental concern? Will the online exhibition ever work, and if so, how? – but the answers feel lacking in substance. The printing isn’t perfect either – photos are somewhat muddied, not helped by sometimes being tinted almost beyond recognition.

I really wanted to love this magazine, to be inspired and amazed by some of the possibilities out there for three-dimensional storytelling. Instead, I found a couple of interesting ideas, within a tidily designed object. So far, I like what it could be much more than what it is. With a bit of thought and some deeper critical analysis, issue two will hopefully get much closer to what I wanted to read.