At the moment, a few of our key team members are hosting a storytelling workshop at the Modern Museum Malmö, in Sweden. The main focus was how museums can use storytelling about the gallery’s collection to engage visitors.
In the workshop, we covered key topics, such as:
- Why Museum Hack tours have been successful with engaging audiences.
- What modern audiences love, and how to talk to them.
- Why storytelling in the museum is so important in making the collection relatable.
- How to “hack” pieces of art: what to look for and how to talk about them.
Storytelling at the Modern Museum Malmö
The history of art is interesting, but often times museum professionals slip into heavy jargon when talking about specific pieces, dates, styles, predecessors, and movements, before making the artwork relatable to the audience. Although the hard facts are important, “fact overwhelm” drains the enthusiasm from your audience and they disengage.
Art can be talked about in a way that fascinates, teaches, and entertains. By wrapping your audience up in a fantastic, hilarious or relatable story about the work or the artist- they become invested in the art, and learn to appreciate it in a totally different way. The gold standard is when your stories go viral, i.e., they are so memorable and compelling that your visitors go home and tell their friends and family about what they learned at the museum.
In this workshop, we showed the group exactly how to weave stories that will captivate and engage the listeners. We worked through some simple tools to hone the skill of storytelling. Then, we worked directly with the group, giving them the opportunity to try out their storytelling skills by creating a story about an object in the collection.
Why Storytelling is Important
The Malmö Art Museum is home to 40,000 works and is one of the world’s major collections of Nordic modern and contemporary art. The collection is a one of a kind catalogue of scandinavian history. To be able to share this history is important — to the museum, to the region, and to the world! Storytelling is one tool that can be used to talk to the audience about the work’s significance in an impactful and memorable way.
Do you want your team to learn storytelling from Museum Hack?
Do you work for a gallery? Would you love to work with us on how to engage audiences through storytelling? Send us an email or read more about our workshops, presentations, and museum consulting work.