Museums and Exhibition Design Research Papers (original) (raw)

This volume argues that museum exhibitions can eff ectively work as a particular way of doing research, a way of exploring the world around us rather than mirroring it. More than that, while this may not at fi rst glance seem to be a... more

This volume argues that museum exhibitions can eff ectively work as a particular way of doing research, a way of exploring the world around us rather than mirroring it. More than that, while this may not at fi rst glance seem to be a particularly revolutionary statement, we contend that, if taken seriously, it does shake a number of the basic pillars of museum practice. If the exhibition is research and not merely a way of communicating research, a number of questions arise: Can we exhibit something, which we do not know the end result of, which is still in the making? Which concepts of "knowledge" apply to such a format? How do we conceive of the roles between the partakers in an exhibition process if this is not a matter of giving shape to a given content? How do we conceive of the role of audiences in exhibitions if research is extended into the exhibition itself? Why, indeed, should we even think of exhibitions as research rather than as a platform to communicate the results of research to a wider audience? These are all questions that we will touch upon in the volume. The idea of exhibitions as research Museums and exhibitions have increasingly been referred to as "laboratories" (MOMA, 2014 ; Heller, Scholz and Wegner, 2015 ; Treimo, this volume; J ø rgensen, this volume) or "experiments", respectively (Healy and Witcomb, 2006 ; Macdonald and Basu, 2007). These terms point to a move away from understanding the museum as a site for representing the world to perceiving the museum, instead, as an agent that produces its own particular eff ects. The museum does not simply mirror the world, but constructs new perspectives and ideas that are generated through the particular mechanisms and qualities of the very institution (Bjerregaard and Willerslev, 2016 , pp. 226-235; Thomas, 2016 , p. 9). One eff ect of this approach to museums has been a focus on the capacity of exhibitions to generate research in and through themselves (Macdonald and Basu, 2007 ; Lehman-Brauns, Sichau and Trischler, 2010 ; Herle, 2013 ; O'Neill and Wilson, 2015). Working intensely with collections, testing ideas out in a physical environment, and relating more or less directly to a lay audience does not only tell us something new about how to make exhibitions, but may also provide us with more insight into the subject matter of the exhibition. That is, the exhibition has the potential to create a research surplus ; through the making of exhibitions we are liable to learn more about the topic of the exhibition. But, as we will explore further 9781138646063_pi-194.indd 1 9781138646063_pi-194.indd 1