The exhibition was first conceived by Glider in partnership with City of Sydney, Customs House Sydney and The Climate Institute, with whom Michael Hall was a Creative Fellow for two years. The inaugural exhibition ran from JUL-SEP 2014 and was an overwhelming success, with over 85,000 visitors through the door and significant media coverage including major newspapers, ABC radio, Australian Geographic, Broadsheet and TimeOut.
Designed specifically for a library context as a space for learning, exploration, and collective story, the exhibition combines over 50 large scale photographic images curated into succinct and impactful narratives. It draws upon other library contexts so that visitors encounter the story in new ways. For instance, by jacketing a collection of climate-related books in exhibition photographs and leaving them around the library to be discovered or inserting photo essays printed onto newsprint into the library’s newspaper resource wall. The exhibition includes other physical and social media activations to allow visitors to contribute and co-create the unfolding story - with their own images and writing.
Visitors found the exhibition “memorable and hard to ignore," "powerful and important," "extremely sobering," "breathtaking in good ways and bad," “human and personal with a a powerful sense of story that struck home in a new way," “eye opening," "awe inspiring and thought provoking" and "a potent reminder of our responsibilities.”
