Substance Use & Misuse, 42:535536

Copyright 2007 Informa Healthcare

ISSN: 1082-6084 (print); 1532-2491 (online)
DOI: 10.1080/10826080601144630

A Museology Display: Questioning and Answering

YEHUDA LEVY-ALDEMA
Hechal Shlomo, The Center for Jewish HeritageJerusalem, Israel
The process of a museology display and experience is presented.
Keywords museology; museology display; museology experience; narrative; questions; visitor

An idea was presented in the Heichal Shlomo Center for Jewish Heritage Museum about
showing an object in its relationship to another exhibit, and not at its simple, traditional
display level.1 A museology display, when designed as an ensemble of relations between
objects is not meant to provide answers or to achieve consensus. The display is meant to
raise questions; hopefully, questions that need asking, which, for a variety of reasons, have
yet to be asked and considered.
The effective display builds a new array of insights that integrate the object, the image,
and the word. The exhibit is an event that is deciphered by a language that is unique to the
display; its building blocks being objects, images, text, sound, and video, as well as what
the visitor brings to the exhibit . . . being open as well as closed to himself, to others, and
to the surrounds.
The visitor in the museological experience can be challenged by and needs to be
helped to move from traditional and anticipated banal meaning as s/he is taken together
with the known museological artifact to the territories of symbol, imagination, metaphor,
and allegory. The new museological sentence must contend with tradition-driven banal
terms of beauty and aesthetic values that leave the visitor without the necessary ability or
the desire to cope with and explore the implications of what s/he perceives when facing the
encrypted questions in the display.
The purpose of the objects in the display is to create drama. The exhibited
object has and is a storya narrativeand it contains dramatic dimensions. The
museology exhibit combines objects that have a story and that create a proven
contradictionand at times challenging paradoxesbetween them in the same exhibit
showcase.
The museological experience is a dynamic event and personal process resulting
from an interchange between a variety of static elements in which their entiretythe
available wholeis an opportunity to influence and create a change in an accessible
visitor; a visitor who both is and represents a range of his cultures and communitys
stakeholders.
The museological experience consists of a number of stages:
Address correspondence to Yehuda Levy-Aldema, Director, Hechal Shlomo, The Center for
Jewish HeritageJerusalem, 55 King George St., P.O.B. 7440, Jerusalem, 91073, Israel. E-mail:
y.levyaldema@gmail.com

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Levy-Aldema

r Stage A: The Why?the motivation for coming to the displayan active deed of
the visitor

r Stage B: The Experiencethe visit to the displayan active deed of the exhibition
r Stage C: The Influencethe experience after the visitin which the (changed?)
visitor initiates and/or participates in an active deed that is somehow related to, or is
a consequence of, experiencing the exhibit, its implications, and its demands.

RESUMEN
El processeso de una exposicion y una experiencia de museologia es presentada.

RESUM
E
Le processus dune exhibition et dune une experience de museology est presente

THE AUTHOR
Yehuda Levy-Aldemi, B.A. (Israel), museum director
and curator, Hechal Shlomo Center for Jewish Heritage Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, formerly director of
the Department of Museums, Ministry of Science, Culture and Sport and deputy director, Bible Lands Museum,
Jerusalem, is a graduate of the Bazalel Academy of Fine
Arts. An artist, photographer, and educator, he has created
many museum and site exhibits, exhibited in group and
one-man shows, and has received numerous prizes. His
areas of interest include Jewish identity, ethics, and transposing visuality into ideas. He is a faculty member of the
Middle Eastern Summer Institute on Drug Use (MESIDU)
in Italy, Spain, and Israel.

Note
1. An exhibit of drawings by Latvian school children about the Jewish synagogue that was
placed in the same room as an exhibit about the Sacrifice of Isaac.