With two museums in one facility, the Melbourne Holocaust Museum caters to audiences of all ages in telling powerful survivor stories.
Following a three-year rebuild and redevelopment, the Melbourne Holocaust Museum (MHM) will welcome the public to two museums in its new facility this November.
The facility is the result of a 10-year design and planning phase led by Kerstin Thompson Architects, which also designed the multi award-winning new Bundanon Art Museum and The Bridge for Creative Learning that opened last year. MHM’s architecture is among the winners for the 2023 Victorian Architecture Awards in the category of Public Architecture. Inside MHM’s two museums at 13-15 Selwyn Street, in the inner Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick – including one tailored for younger audiences – are immersive VR (virtual reality) testimony experiences and a special memorial place.
Founded by Holocaust survivors in 1984, MHM is dedicated to the education of Holocaust history, as well as combating antisemitism, racism and prejudice.
MHM CEO Jayne Josem tells ArtsHub: ‘Inside the MHM visitors will be able to experience two very different exhibitions within the museum, as well as a unique immersive survivor testimony delivered via VR headsets. The building itself, designed by Kerstin Thompson Architects, with its warm wooden interiors, areas to sit and think, as well as mirrors to encourage self-reflection, provides a calming balance to some of the difficult content to be encountered within the exhibitions.’
The core exhibition, Everybody Had a Name: a History of the Holocaust will present a chronological overview through artefacts, documents, photographs, multimedia and artworks. A special museum trail takes visitors through the testimony of one of six survivors through an interactive postcard. Together, these elements ‘continuously tell the macro history while zooming in to the microhistory – the stories of individuals who lived through this nightmare,’ continues Josem.
Read the article by Celina Lei on Arts Hub.