Bridging the Gap between Museums and Individuals with Visual Impairments

Rakursi Art Gallery is a partner in the international project BaGMIVI : Bridging the Gap between Museums and Individuals with Visual Impairments.

The project is based on the changed understanding of museums as places not only for collecting, preserving and exhibiting artworks, but as an audience-oriented spaces with broader educational and social role (Hooper-Greenhill, 2007). From this point of view, of great interest to museums becomes accessibility for disabled people.

Visually impaired people face numerous obstacles in their access to museums, so more and more museums and galleries operate to facilitate and attract them to their spaces and collections.

In this project gallery “Rakursi” cooperates with the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Faculty “Special Education” and the Bulgarian Association of Visually Impaired Children, as well as with other European universities, institutions and museums that are part of the project BaGMIVI from the program “Erasmus +” of the EU.

On the 19th of April 2016 Rakursi Art Gallery held the exhibition “Touch the Treasure” for visually impaired students from the school of children with visual impairment “Louis Braille” in Sofia. It is a tactile exhibition of objects – selected replicas of Thracian ancient treasures. The show is adapted to the educational program and the interests of the students. At the exhibition the children can touch and examine the rhitons, vases and plates and acquire information about the exhibited objects – their function, history, origin, etc. by the gallery staff.

The exhibition ends with an interactive game of locating of the different treasures on a map.