Ayahs and Amahs project: Online exhibition goes live

Transcolonial Journeys: The Ayahs and Amahs Project’s online exhibition uses images and stories to reconstruct, describe and analyse the experiences of these women as well as digital technologies to make history accessible to a global audience.

Website developer and exhibition curator, Dr. Lauren Samuelsson (University of Wollongong, Australia) is thrilled to announce that after many months of research and design, the exhibition will be launched on Thursday 8 September by Emeritus Professor Heather Goodall and Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) as part of NSW History Council’s History Week.

“The Ayahs and Amahs Project is incredibly lucky to be able to draw upon the wealth of visual and literary representations of ayahs and amahs from across the world,” Dr Samuelsson said.

“The objects that we wished to use in the exhibition, which ranged from postcards to oil paintings and oral histories, are located in various cultural institutions, private collections and online repositories.”

Dr Samuelsson explained how the exhibition follows a ‘hub and spoke’ model where there is a central page (the hub) with various galleries (the spokes) of thematically linked content that visitors can explore based on their own personal preferences.

“While visitors can ‘choose their own adventure’, we also provide signposting and direction for the visitors and each of our galleries has a particular thematic focus, with narratives interwoven within and throughout the galleries themselves."

“This project has been such an incredible collaborative learning experience,” Dr Samuelsson said.

And while history is the main focus of the exhibition, after years of lockdowns and restricted travel, the team want to harness the feeling of a journey reflecting the idea of transnational flows.

Making visitors feel that they are actively participating, taking action, and interacting with the objects on display, rather than simply scrolling through pages has been one of the project’s key initiatives.

In the words of Lesley Bedford, a consultant and member of New York’s The Museum Group, it is designed to encourage personal reflection and public discussion by making “connections between museum artifacts and images and [their] lives and memories.”

Join the Australian contingent of Ayahs and Amahs team, Professor Victoria Haskins, Associate Professor Claire Lowrie, Dr Lauren Samuelsson and Srishti Guha in their face-to-face only launch at The Loft at UTS on Thursday 8 September.

For those who can’t make the launch, sign up to be notified when the exhibition goes live.

Visit Dr Samuelsson’s blog, to find out more about the opportunities that the Ayahs and Amahs team embraced and the challenges they faced to bring this exhibition to life.