Uurali kaja Eesti Rahva Muuseumis
Authors: Karm Svetlana , Leete Art 
Published: January 2019

The Echo of the Urals exhibition at the Estonian National Museum

Our objective was to analyse the process of preparing the Echo of the Urals permanent exhibition we produced for the Estonian National Museum. We focused on the historical background of the exhibition and the methodological and ideological positions that the exhibition committee relied on. In this article, we dealt with how the concept for the exhibition developed and the principles for the technical solutions used at the exhibition. We also tried to analyse the retrospective views taken by the exhibition’s content and design committees regarding their work.
Many previous Finno-Ugric permanent exhibitions at the Estonian National Museum had focused on presenting folk art, and this aspiration was reflected even in the titles of the exhibitions. Moreover, the Finno-Ugric scholars at the National Museum also tried to use the exhibitions to gain an overview of the existing materials at the museum concerning a specific ethnic group. Such exhibitions also focused on the Finno-Ugric people and so as representative a set of artefacts as possible was placed on display, systematised in the spirit of scientific objectivity. From the second half of the 1990s on, the museum’s researchers started producing exhibitions on more experimental themes as well, testing the suitability of various ideas for an ethnographic exhibit. Some ideas are exciting on paper while artefacts can fail to express more abstract qualities. Our permanent exhibition was based on the historical legacy, and we tried to find a simple, relevant starting idea for the exhibition that made full use of the museum’s collections. After discussions, we chose Echo of the Urals as the title of the exhibition. In doing so, we tried to refer in a lyrical vein to the idea of an original home for the Finno-Ugrians and allow different peoples to be introduced in a single framework. The idea of linguistic kinship may be easy to understand for scholars and many Finno-Ugrians, but we also thought about visitors who did not know anything about the topic. We devoted the main part of the exhibit to the ethnographic representation of gender roles, trying to get viewers to think about everyday gender roles and cultural differences. We hoped that presenting the cultural roles of males and females would be a simple starting idea that would also be of interest to many. The exhibition design had to be state-of-the-art, a finely tuned machine, at the same time creating emotionally gripping, seemingly semi-natural ethnographic attractions.
As a result of our research, we found that although we tried to create an emotionally captivating and conceptually balanced exhibition, we were criticised in the critical reception for allegedly haphazard choices (the gender theme was criticised) and having a romantic aim to find beauty (to the detriment of reflecting the situation faced by indigenous cultures today). Our analysis of the making of our ethnographic exhibition with ambitious and seemingly conflicting or even simultaneously unattainable goals is limited by the lack of a bystander’s perspective and the lack of temporal distance between the completion of the exhibition and the our meta-research. Our main conclusion regarding the process of creating the exhibition consists of thorough conceptualisation intertwined with intuitive aesthetic and intellectual prediction.