Task 5: Graduation Showcase

I gotta say, this graduate exhibition is the most challenging assignment of all these 3 years of study, the most challenging is always at the end. I am as the student president who's in charge of the entire work flow, and it wasn't easy to take such a huge responsibility, I often snapped at my classmates and lost control with the words I say to them.

There were tons of works to do and to be checked while working, we have made many gantt charts and schedule to follow up with the work flow. First of all we have divided ourselves into different working teams.

Hereby I would like to talk about each team's teamwork as a president. Mohsen is as the V.president and he has been a really supporting partner to work with, he's full of ideas to help and always willing to help, he's a great leader with a nice temper, he would never snap at the problems and he would always comfort the students and encourage us to do our best, and I'm really glad to lead the entire team with him. The event manager and assistant are really responsible as well.

The PR&Marketing team along with the Finance team had a great team work, as they helped us locating a sponsorship to lose a bit off our burden. We have gained 600 RM sponsor funds from Zhung Zhen ltd. and these funds helped us a lot during the planning and making of the exhibition. One thing that can be done better from this team is that they have forgotten to research on different agencies that could possibly explore our creativities and building a good career ahead our future.

The Exhibition team is a blast with the best leader Steve, Steve is a very responsible leader, he is always willing to help, always has this positive vibes while working. He had helped a lot and put a lot into this entire exhibition, and I'd say he could gain a lot of credit through this entire exhibition.

Creative team might be a bit draggy, but entirely they had produced design works but not as efficient. Mohsen gets the most credits in creative team as he's always producing beautiful designs full of ideas.

We have looked up to the last batches who have successfully graduated and curated their exhibition a year ago while working on our exhibition, we also have tried to find inspirations by looking at exhibitions that were done by others around the world. 

We had been through a difficult time picking up a right theme and name for ourselves, and we had asked the individuals from the entire team to contribute their ideas and share what they think of. And we really had a bunch of funny and adorable names for ourselves. 

Our thoughts were messy while choosing a name for ourselves, and eventually with Ms. Nadira's help we had finally decided to name ourselves "SOULS" as in "SOU15" which represents 15 of us. And our slogan is Visual Existence, as in the word "Souls" can be understood very abstractly and can't be visually seen, but through the artworks of our hardworking, our souls were reflected onto our artworks and they are visually existed.

Our schedule constantly changed and was constantly updated as the schedule was intense with tons of works to do on our plates, but we still eventually managed to finish up everything before the deadline which I am very proud of. 

The process of designing the logo was various and alternative, all of us liked different types of designs and agreed with different things, eventually we have decided with the logo by voting at the logos we all like and prefer from the ones that were designed by the student presidents. And ultimately we had decided to go with the design above this paragraph that was done by V. president Mohsen. 

The banner design was a head scratch, we seemed like to squeeze out all of our brain juice to come out with a great idea to design our banner/poster, we have tried capturing motions of our bodies with dslr cameras set up on a slow shutter speed mode, and we also have tried scanning our hand motions on a scanner, but the outcomes didn't seem to be good looking at all. Eventually, I had spent a little time experimenting in the photo studio by myself, I set up the studio tungsten light to let the light shoot from the behind of the subject to have a silhouette effect, and I found it very eye-pleasing when it's black and white. And eventually we decided to go with my idea of this banner design.

The most important part of this exhibition is the layout of how I would like to showcase my artworks in the exhibition, in the beginning, I had a layout sketched down: 

In this layout sketch, I had planned for an M sized panel with the top and bottom panels, but some changes had occurred while setting up the panels, the mall didn't have enough panel boards to be installed, so we had finally decided to leave the bottom panel boards empty and only display the artworks on the top panel boards, so I had changed the layout, I moved the bottom 3 horizontal landscape A3 sized artworks onto the top panel boards along with the 4 A3 sized portrait/vertical artworks and hung the experimented artworks that I had made in the darkroom - the black and white photographic papers contains the exposed objects. And on the side of the panels, I had displayed the back up book cover pages that I had printed as an extra and didn't apply them into making the book  on the top panel boards, and the empty bottom, I had displayed the small black and white photographic papers that contain exposed subject matters. 

My conclusion of this exhibition: I had a great time curating this exhibition, we had been through happy moments, sad moments, angry moment as well as emotional moments and tiring moments, but we all gained a lot through all these treasurable and memorable moments. It was a real challenge to me and real experience of my life time!