A Journey Unlike Any Other: An Interactive Exhibition at the National Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract

A Journey Unlike Any Other is an interactive museum exhibition that introduces visitors to the experience of being a refugee. First, the visitor is confronted with hostility from soldiers in the homeland, and later, after an escape, with all the difficulties derived from meetings with police and immigration authorities in the new country. The provocations visitors endure during the course of the exhibition enhance a high degree of perceptual awareness, reflectivity and memory. In the aftermath of their experience, visitors indicate an increase of empathic understanding and experiential knowledge, whereas their interest in information and further background knowledge seems to be unaffected.

Art, emotion, and existential well-being.

“…Phenomenological studies (Corff, 2014; Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson, 1990; Funch, 1997; Panzarella, 1980; Roald, 2015) show, like these two examples, an emphasis on how a work of art appears during an aesthetic experience. More precisely, how the sensate form of the work and the elicited emotions appear with existential depth whereas cognitive aspects are almost unaffected.…”

“…The emotional aspect is characterized by an exceptional genuine and penetrating emotional quality that corresponds to the existential theme of the picture and that is often ineffable. An aesthetic experience is furthermore characterized by a feeling of enlightened pleasure and existential density as if the entire experience is infused by a personal quality (Funch, 1997, 2007). The aftermath of an aesthetic experience creates, according to Monroe C. Beardsley (1981, pp.…”

Sense and subjectivity. Hidden potentials in psychological aesthetics.

“…Fechner’s psycho-physical approach is generally acknowledged as the initiation of psychological aesthetics (cf. Allesch, 2006; Funch, 1997). Although Fechner approached aesthetic phenomena philosophically and theoretically, it was his empirical psycho-physical approach to aesthetic phenomena that became prominent.…”

“…Most contemporary psychological research into aesthetics ignores philosophy’s long-standing concern with this topic and is instead largely focused on cognitive information processes, neuropsychological modeling, and otherwise quantitative demarcations of the creation and reception process (cf. Funch, 1997; Roald, 2007, in press; Roald & Lang, 2013). 1 This is problematic because these approaches have great limitations when it comes to art.…”

“…The point is neither to review the entire tradition of psychological aesthetics, but to show how certain themes have dominated the field (cf. Allesch, 2006; Funch, 1997 for reviews). The examples of psychological aesthetics that we discuss have been selected because they are telling of how experiences with art and processes of sensing have been treated within this field.…”