Bethlem Museum of the Mind

We produced digital interactives, audio and films for this museum about mental health at Bethlem Hospital. One exhibit involved chroma key filmed people reciting comments from visitors to the hospital past and present. These were projected life-sized onto a wall at the entrance of the gallery.

Another film featured a dream-like sequence of a street scene, seen through the frame of a window that patients at the old hospital looked out of to pass the time.

We worked with the psychiatric team and ex-patients, to make films about the difficult decisions they take to detain people under the mental health act, and produced an interactive exhibit that allowed visitors to see the films and vote on what outcome they thought was appropriate. This has been particularly useful at the museum as a tool to encourage debate amongst school groups.

We created several exhibit/films from archive material.

Digital interactives we created explore positive and negative mental health terms and issues. One interactive allowed visitors to drill down into an ‘encyclopaedia’ of mental health conditions, whilst another simply exposed a range of terms that were used historically to mock or stereotype mental health.

Bethlem Museum of the Mind was nominated to be Museum of the Year by Grayson Perry.