Multi-Sensory Museum – Experience art through scent, sound, touch and sight. The Van Abbemuseum’s new multi-sensory collection Delinking and Relinking invites you to experience art differently: in some cases literally by feeling, smelling or hearing art. Delinking and Relinking spans over a century of art history. The earliest work Hommage à Apollinaire by Marc Chagall from 1913 and the most recent is the 2019 tapestry This Means Tableau by Laure Prouvost.
Multi-sensory
With over 25 multi-sensory tools, including texts in Braille, scent interpretations, tactile drawings and sound scapes, Delinking and Relinking is the first fully multi-sensory collection displayed in the Netherlands. The exhibition enriches everyone’s experience of art and makes the artworks accessible to a greater diversity of visitors, including wheelchair users and blind and deaf visitors.
See, feel and smell
Fresh and smoky. That’s how the scented card would describe itself. It belongs to the 1936 painting “Le bain des Vagabonds” by Belgian painter Jean Brusselmans. CBB provided braille for these scented cards, and we also developed the tactile drawings displayed in the museum and we produced the information signage in braille.
For the development of the exhibition, the Van Abbemuseum collaborated with various (experiential) experts in the field of physical accessibility and inclusion (advocacy) groups. Accessibility is at the heart of this exhibition, which we believe is a textbook example for every museum.