Logbook #21
Observations: Number of Visitors + Time Spent
When trying to keep a tally of how many people visited the exhibition in total, I was careful to not count repeat visitors when I would recognize them. Another benefit of sitting through the exhibition every hour that is was open, was being able to collect this information. Over the six days the exhibition was open, a total of about 140-150 people came to see the exhibition. This number includes an estimation of about 40-60 people at the opening (I was unable to count, but created this estimation after consulting with Johnny Farrow, Julie Stopper, and David Darts, all of whom had to stay for the whole time. From Monday to Friday that week, the number of people visiting in one day ranged from 15-25 people. Visitors would come in a more or less steady stream throughout the 6 hours and about half would come with someone and the other half would come alone.
I was pleasantly surprised with how much time people would give to the exhibition, and I consider this to be one of the ways to determine a certain level of success. People stayed for a range of about 10 minutes up to- and in rare cases- even past 30 minutes, with the average visitor spending about 20 minutes in the room. In order to read all the wall texts, look at and read each work, and watch the videos, more than 30 minutes was needed. I had two conversations with students lasting more than 15 minutes so that they stayed for 45 minutes.
One of them, an Emirati and Syrian student asked me how many other Emirati students had seen the exhibition (I think total 3-4 Emirati students saw the exhibition), saying when she left that she was going to tell her friends to stop by. We spoke about how the topic of labor is one that is often avoided, which she felt was a shame, saying that it saddens her how easily labor issues and labor itself becomes invisible.
Some visitors came back after having come to the opening to be able to read through things they didn’t have time for the first time. And other visitors came throughout the week and would leave saying they wanted to come back later when they had more time. The most intriguing of these second-time visitors was a professor who came back a day or two after visiting, walked directly up to Serkan Ozkaya’s Broadway Boogie Woogie as if to check something or to re-read the label, and then left.
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