Following Al Ain Museum’s reopening on Wednesday after extensive restoration, there will be two more big museum openings in Abu Dhabi before the year is out, as The National reported this month. Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi will open on November 22 on Saadiyat Island, while Zayed National Museum will begin welcoming visitors on the other side of Jacques Chirac Street on December 3.
It is a watershed moment for anyone who has keenly followed the Saadiyat Island cultural project since it was announced almost two decades ago.
Earlier this year, teamLab Phenomena opened in the same neighbourhood and many UAE residents will be aware that Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is rapidly transforming from vision to reality and is expected to open next year.
The cluster of museums in a single neighbourhood, which also includes the long-established Louvre Abu Dhabi, will represent one of the great global concentrations of cultural institutions when fully commissioned. The expansive promise of the district as it was originally articulated in the late 2000s has become an impressive reality in the 2020s.
The Natural History Museum promises to offer an “immersive” look at life on Earth when it opens and will feature a rolling programme that begins with an exhibit that tells the story of a prehistoric touring triceratops herd. Zayed National Museum will host an array of artefacts in a multisensory space, including a reproduction of a Bronze Age vessel. The institution also announced its collection extends to more than 3,000 pieces, with half of that number expected to go on display at the start of December.
While we could reasonably expect to see the rest of the collection over the next few years, that number speaks to a broader point: many museums have most of their collections in storage much of the time.
There may be several reasons for works not being on display in their home institution, and might include preservation works to a particular piece, a decline in its popularity or significance or being on loan elsewhere. Events in Paris this week have, of course, reminded us that theft is another reason for absence and a persistent risk global institutions face.
Criminals stole nine pieces of royal jewellery last weekend from the Louvre, dropping, damaging and abandoning a studded crown as they left the scene. The theft has been described as an attack on French history and there are fears that the eight missing pieces, valued at more than $100 million but in reality, culturally priceless, may never be recovered intact.
Some might point to the historical example of the Mona Lisa for signs of hope for a reasonable conclusion to this week’s brazen theft. Stolen in August 1911 from Paris, the painting was eventually recovered two years later but only when the thief, who had once briefly worked as a contractor at the museum, attempted to sell the work in Italy.
Estimates say many major global institutions routinely exhibit less than 10 per cent of their collections at any one time. The British Museum, a cultural behemoth that dealt with theft from its archives earlier this decade, might typically only display about 1 per cent of its 8 million pieces at any given moment.
Other institutions have started to deliver elegant solutions to showing previously hidden parts of their collection to audiences, experimenting with forms of visible storage. Or there is the example, the V&A museum, which opened its new “backstage pass” facility in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park earlier this year. V&A East Storehouse gives “unprecedented access” to the museum’s collection of thousands of objects, books and archives, it says.
Wandering around the multi-level space on a recent visit to London was a joy. The facility presents an intoxicating brew of potluck discovery with clever curation in a setting that is redolent of the pickup aisles of a flatpack furniture warehouse. Look over there and there is the Kaufmann office roomset, the only complete Frank Lloyd Wright interior outside the US. In another spot are a pair of Palestinian dresses, one decorated with red embroidery on raw linen, the other embellished with bold colours and silk patchwork.
The long industrial storage racks emphasise the depth and variety of the institution’s collection and the unusual nature of presentation, and serve as a constant reminder that this is no “ordinary” museum visit. The facility also offers an “order an object” experience, where visitors can book in advance to conjure a piece from storage under the supervision of museum staff.
All told, the space brings new light to hidden gems from the institution’s collection and makes museums accessible in a very different way than previously. Digital collection presentation is, of course, another way to allow greater access to collections, but there is something particularly uplifting about seeing artworks and artefacts in person.
It is an impossible wish, but a final piece of the local cultural puzzle might be a visitor-friendly storehouse in Abu Dhabi where museumgoers could intersect with collection pieces away from the museum’s main spaces. The diverse mix of museums and their collections on Saadiyat will make for the most satisfying and complex visitor experience from next month. A storehouse could elevate the experience still further.
