Founders' Memorial In-Exhibition Engagement

Challenge

The Founders’ Memorial will be an integrated gallery and garden experience at Bay East Garden. The Memorial is slated to open in 2028. It will commemorate the legacy of Singapore’s founding leaders and the values and ideals upon which independent Singapore was built.

To achieve its objectives of being a space for reflection, inspiration and unity, the Memorial sought to gather feedback through its pilot exhibition titled ‘Semangat yang Baru: Forging a New Singapore Spirit’. It tried to understand how the exhibition could be a starting point for conversations and reflections amongst different groups of audiences.

Approach

We designed and facilitated a programme of 10 x 3-hour interactive sessions between July and Oct 2023. Each session involved 20 participants from different life-stages, races and birth locations testing a range of engagement modalities situated within the exhibition – reflection, writing, observation, drawing, reading, craft work – which facilitated sharing, connecting and debating.

Impact

This was an important pilot programme for the Founders’ Memorial to test how its exhibitions could be a unifying platform for different audiences. The Memorial will build on insights collected through these engagements to continue testing exhibition-anchored engagements as a platform for fostering social cohesion.

“This project was a demanding one as it aimed to offer participants a programmatic experience of conversing with diverse individuals in an exhibition setting. It also sought to find out how well the exhibition content resonated with the audience, and how useful the content was in facilitating meaningful discussions. Verian balanced the various demands of the project well, going above and beyond to familiarise themselves with the content of our exhibition and in synthesising insights from the engagements.”

– Alexandra Tan, Senior Manager (Partnerships & Engagement), Founders' Memorial