Thinking Through Exhibition Making

Register for the seminar

Our museum is committed to aims optimizing the dynamics between collection management, research and exhibiting as well as utilizing the multidisciplinary composition of our museum to produce outputs that have a public impact. One way of achieving this is to rethink the boundary between collection management, research and exhibiting in a way which makes exhibitions and their design not only a passive mode of disseminating results of prior research but also an active part of an ongoing process of  generating new perspectives and understandings. By “Thinking Through Exhibition Making” the seminar offers an opportunity to reflect upon and discuss the potentials for new insights and understandings of exhibitions in the making.

In this year’s seminar we have thus invited scholars who have shown a strong interest in the knowledge producing potentials of exhibition making. They will share their experiences and perspectives on exhibition making as an active mode of researching the world.

Programme

• 12:00: Doors open, coffee and light lunch
• 12:30: Welcome, by Museum Director Håkon Glørstad
• 12:40: Keynote 1: Dr Anita Herle, Senior Curator (Anthropology), the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
  Moderator: Arne Perminow
  
  Exhibition Making as Research – Thinking Through Colour 
  This presentation draws on a multi-disciplinary exhibition COLOUR: Art, Science & Power at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in the University of Cambridge (July 2022 – April 2023).  It investigates exhibition-making as a specialist form of collaborative practice and knowledge production, which encompasses a close multi-sensory engagement with things. This process of exploration and experimentation carries on in the discussions and activities that the displays stimulate, and in the ideas and reflections that visitors take away.   
• 13:40: short coffee break
• 13:50: Keynote 2: Dr Peter Bjerregaard, Head of Programming, Danish museum of Science & Technology.
  
  COLLAPSOLOGY-IN-THE-MAKING
  We often tend to think of exhibitions as a kind of communication, where complex, research-based knowledge has to be reduced in order to become accessible to a lay audience. In this presentation I will argue that we would gain from an understanding of exhibition-making not as a reduction of complex knowledge, but as a constant process of de-construction and construction of knowledge. This kind of knowledge process is based both in the museum exhibition as a spatial rather than textual medium as well as in recent years increased focus on cross-disciplinarity and the collaboration with groups external to the museum.I will draw on two of the exhibition processes I worked with at Museum of Cultural History from 2011-19, and from our ongoing work at the Danish Museum of Science and Technology. 
  Moderator: Pia Edqvist
• 14:50: Break with refreshments
• 15:10: Keynote 3: Dr Elizabeth Hallam, Associate Professor in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.
  Moderator: Steinar Solheim
• 16:10: Short coffee break
• 16:20-17:20: Panel conversation on Thinking Through Exhibition Making
  Moderator: Henrik Treimo, discussant: Arne Perminow
• 17:30 Programme ends

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Please contact forskningsradgiver@khm.uio.no if you have any questions.