Project Coordinator: Meltem Maralcan Gülmen, PhD

Scenography, which is a term of theater discipline and used as a principle of exhibition today, means the graphic of the stage. With the trend of story based approaches in exhibition and the researches to reveal the memories of the objects to create these stories, bridges exhibition discipline with theatre which has an experience of staging stories for hundreds of years. Objects take the leading role in object-oriented display.. The researches carried out to reveal the memory of objects with narrative approaches in exhibitions inevitably bring this field closer to the art of theater, which has been telling stories on stage for centuries. The object is the actor, the stage is the exhibition area and the audience is the visitors… and the curtain opens…

The schenographic design studio, which is a senior project in the Industrial Iesign Department of Beykent University, focuses on storytelling in object-oriented display. With a different theme chosen each year, students organize their own curated exhibitions using the schenographic tools and methods they learned in the lesson to tell the stories of the objects. Here, of course, the story, that is, the story of the object, is very important. Neither a good story nor a good display can be effective alone, so it is important to investigate the story of the object in detail during the research phase of the project.

The theme of this year’s scenographic design studio was “object / memory / space”. The subject of the exhibition is especially about the objects of memory. For the exhibition, each student was asked to portray five objects with different memories and their stories and exhibit them with scenographic display tools.

In the first stage of the project, students created and wrote their own perspectives on the main title of the exhibition, namely object / memory / space, and then researched, found and presented "memory objects" to support their perspectives. The students were told that the process of researching these objects could be through interviews with the people who collected such objects, or it could be fed from a historical story. In the research phase, information and stories were gathered from the story of the owner of the object on the one hand, and from autobiographical research of the object itself, on the other.

The students then narrated these stories connotatively with the schenographic methods they learned in the studio, and designed getting inspired by these stories in order to physically convey these stories with the exhibition units, and also realized their placement (virtually) in the exhibition space.

As the curators of their own exhibitions, the students also did their graphic work and designed the poster to create the identity of the exhibition by combining the different memory objects they exhibited under a concept that would support their perspectives that they initially presented.

A selection of student work is presented in this exhibition.