Completely brilliant on every level: Tom Jeffreys celebrates the opening of a major new wing at the National Maritime Museum.
The National Maritime Museum has unveiled its brand new Sammy Ofer Wing today, a massive £36.5 million project that aims to mark the beginning of a radical new era in the institution's venerable history. Made possible thanks to a whopping donation of £20 million from shipping magnate Sammy Ofer (who sadly died at the beginning of June) as well as £5 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the new wing includes two significant gallery spaces, a café, brasserie, library, lounge area and significantly increased space for the museum's vast archive.
The whole project is a seriously impressive one, demonstrating both clear-headed strategic vision from the top and almost unrivalled passion and creativity right down to the smallest detail. At the media view a whole host of different people are on hand to talk about their contributions, however small, and their excitement shines through at every level.
From Alice Ceresole and Christopher Thomas Allen at The Light Surgeons, who've produced an incredibly complex and fascinating video projection as part of the permanent Voyagers gallery [pictured below]; to Matt Wade at Kin who's helped in a radical project to open up the Museum's archive through a series of engaging innovations; and the museum's own Henry Holland (not that one) who's created a seemingly simple piece of software to enable visitors to access the museum's collection of shipbuilding blueprints: it's genuinely inspiring to see so much energy and innovation at this kind of institution.
What is really interesting, for me, is the way in which the National Maritime Museum are in the process of re-evaluating the very concept of the museum archive. No longer is there some kind of suspicious relationship between the 'real' object and the 'virtual' representation. Here – and it's still a work in progress – the two operate with and alongside each other. No longer, for example, is a museum website simply a marketing tool, but an integral part of the museum's storage and presentation of the information that it holds within. It's a fascinating development, and with the presence of a new on-site archive, one that's of value to both excitable schoolchildren and serious researchers alike.
With so much going on here, there's a danger of information overload, but the new Sammy Ofer wing is laid out in clean and unfussy style, with a minimum of that kind of data-heavy wall text that can make the modern museum such a drag. The aim here is clearly to stimulate the desire for knowledge, not to ram that knowledge down your throat. The visitor experience is emphatically active and fun – interactive in the best possible sense of that overused word.
Exemplifying this approach is the 'headline' exhibition, as it were: High Arctic [pictured below]. Produced by the consistently brilliant United Visual Artists in collaboration with Cape Farewell, who organise for some of the world's leading artists, writers and scientists to visit and respond to the Arctic, High Arctic is a complete and utter triumph, and quite unlike anything else I've visited. 
The idea is to explore one way in which we might remember the Arctic, should the doomsayers be proved right, and the whole thing melt by 2100. Again, explanation is minimal (although there is some spiel and a video outside); instead, visitors are simply given a UV torch and then left to navigate their own way through the darkness.
Inside are over 3,000 numbered columns – each one representing a real glacier – as well as various strange sort of zones, in which one can use the torch to melt icebergs, create oil slicks, operate location systems and navigate your way through a blizzard, all through complex systems of shifting, swirling graphics. All the while a chill wind whistles through, and snippets of poetry by Nick Drake (again, not that one) flit in and out of one's consciousness. By turns it's noisy, engrossing, enlightening, exciting, even serene – as one takes to a bench for a moment's contemplation. It's genuinely another world – one marked by a real sense of discovery, but also by a dark truth at its centre: this is a world in danger of being destroyed.
There's one moment that sums it up for me I think. Sitting enchanted amid the darkness and the swirling light, purple UVs zipping around me, I catch some slowly declaimed lines: “a story you have to tell yourselves...a story written not in stone, but in time.” This is exactly what this is: both High Arctic as an experience that one shapes oneself, and the Sammy Ofer Wing more generally as the radical re-appraisal of an archive – an archive that is now a process, and one that takes place between people, in places, over time. “Not a story with an end,” one hopes, “but to be continued...”
High Arctic is at the National Maritime Museum until 31st January 2012.
Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in London.
Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.
Add an event
Frieze Art Fair to launch new section for young galleries in 2012
Frieze have today announced details for the 2012 edition, their tenth art fair in London. Taking place...