After a year of being shuttered due to the pandemic, Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Children’s Museum reopens on Friday, June 18. Its latest exhibition, filled with interactive displays, puts feelings front and centre.
Emotions!: The New Art Adventure focuses on four basic emotions – joy, sadness, fear and anger – and allows children and their parents to explore them through artworks, games, creative activities and immersive experiences. It is suitable for children from ages 4 to 10.
While Louvre Abu Dhabi reopened in June 2020, the children’s museum had to remain closed due to the UAE capital’s Covid-19 restrictions for children. At the same time, the team had to produce the exhibition and reconfigured a few elements to follow safety guidelines.
“We reviewed the designs to ensure that we have as much of a touchless experience as possible and that we can maintain social distancing,” Amine Kharchach says, adding that the museum has also installed additional sanitization stations and limited the capacity of visitors to its spaces. Kharchach is Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Interpretation & Mediation Manager and headed up the creation of Emotions.
As visitors enter the space, they can create personal profiles and receive wristbands to scan at certain game stations throughout the show. Players can earn points with each game.
The first of the exhibition’s three sections lays the foundation for its theme. At the centre of the room is an interactive display with a cascading four-colored waterfall, with each color corresponding to each of the four basic emotions.
A total of 10 artworks from Louvre Abu Dhabi’s collection, as well as loans from Musee d’Orsay and XXX, become points of discovery and close observation of the art and the emotions conveyed within. To appeal to children, the artwork subjects have corresponding cartoon versions that speak to visitors on text displays. The 17th century painting Boy with a Soap Bubble by Frans Hans the Elder, for example, is used as a model of happiness.
“This artworks show me when I’m really happy. I’m so pleased my cheeks are all pink!,” the character says, pointing out aspects of his painter’s style too. “Frans has a talent for showing his models in a realistic manner with expression spontaneous poses.”
A series of observation games on nearby screens, where players must find hidden details in the work and imagine the cause for his joy, encourages children to pay closer attention to the subject’s expression and mood. “We always try to create the right level of engagement, so we rely on gamification and observational challenges that will make the children look closer at the artworks,” Kharchach says.
The rest of the works span various periods and geographies, including a wooden mask from traditional Japanese theatre that represents a tragic prince figure and a 2,000-year-old miniature terracotta mask with a fear-stricken expression from ancient Greek theatre.
In developing the exhibition, Kharchach explains that he and his team considered both art history and scientific insights to select the works and find ways to utilize them. “We looked at the scientific literature on emotions and most experts agree on these four basic emotions that children can feel and experience, sometimes all in one day,” he says. “Then we worked with art history to see how artists throughout the ages and civilisations worked with emotions and expressed them through their creations.”
“We focused on works with facial expressions because this is more accessible to children,” he explains. “But we also added an example of a landscape painting and a sculpture that shows emotion through body gestures.” Kharchach is referring to a clay sculpture Weeping Woman, which dates back 2,700 years ago and shows a sorrowful female figure with her arms placed on her head and chest.
The second section of Emotions moves from observation to creation, with three stations for children to draw, create a collage or a sculpture. For this, Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Children’s Museum worked with three Emirati artists to film instructional videos that are played on a loop at each station.
Ali Kashwani’s tutorial teaches children how to draw facial expressions, while Maryam Al Atouly helps them create a collage with stickers and Shaima Al Amri asks them to fashion a sculpture from colored pipe cleaners.
While the first section focused on visual demonstrations of emotion, an interactive DJ or music booth in the second section explores it aurally. By switching from different coloured vinyls, visitors can play sounds that echo feelings of happiness, sadness, fear and anger.
Emotions’ final section, decked out as more of playground, is where feelings can be expressed and released. In one display called The Anger Eater, children are asked to write or draw something that upset them on a piece of paper and then feeding it to a giant mask with a gaping mouth.
Housed under the dome, the section also features a colourful tree whose branches must be filled with visitors’ replies to prompts on leaf-shaped notes and an artificial stream for paper boats covered in confessional scribbles. On one side, individuals can spin a wheel of emotions which details how to deal with certain feelings when they arise. By registering for a wristband at the start of the show, visitors can receive a similar colour wheel of emotion that they can print out and use at home.
Though vaccination rates on the rise and reopenings abound around the world, the pandemic has had a lingering impact on people’s mental health. With many children adjusting to hybrid schooling due to the pandemic and parents working from home alongside them, issues of emotional wellbeing have come to the forefront in many homes. Kharchach is hoping that Emotions can serve as a place to start a conversation for families. “When we’re able to trigger interactions that encourage parents and children to explore together – sometimes this whole experience is important than the content itself,” he says.
Entry to Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Children’s Museum is free for visitors 18 and under. Admission tickets for accompanying adults are valid for both the museum’s galleries and exhibitions as well the Children’s Museum.
Emotions!: The New Art Adventure opens to the public on June 18. More information on louvreabudhabi.ae
