ABSTRACT

How to ExhibitOnline?

According to ICOM’s definition, one of the most important tasks of museums is to exhibit the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment. It can be said that ICOM envisages the implementation of this task in real museum spaces and, despite the better and more complex technical possibilities, it does not pay enough attention to the high-quality digital archiving of exhibitions.

In my presentation, I invite conference participants to a time travel and, with the help of ExhibitOnline archiving software, we have brought to life three exhibitions of different eras in the digital space and made them live and livable again for the general public and research purposes. The time travel begins with the Ludwig Museum’s BarabasiLab: Hidden Patterns exhibition in 2020. Here we present an ‘ideal’ archiving situation, as the exhibition installation that still exists between closed doors did not set any boundaries in the production of the digital imprint of the exhibition.The next stop is the Frida Kahlo exhibition, which was held at the Hungarian National Gallery in 2018 with great success. Our hands were much more tied here, as the exhibition only had to be reconstructed from the materials available in the archive, which were fortunately very well documented. Finally, I invite the audience to the 20th century permanent exhibition of the Museum of Fine Arts, which opened in 1972. Organized by Krisztina Passuth, the exhibition was one of the most significant and nationally influential exhibitions in the history of the museum, presenting for the first time the museum’s art material, which also features works by contemporary Western artists. The ongoing digital reconstruction of this exhibition is even more challenging because we have even less visual documentation than the exhibitions presented earlier.