TY - JOUR
T1 - Exhibition curation as practice-as-research performance historiography
T2 - an incomplete story of audience experience
AU - Holmes, Kate
PY - 2022/7/26
Y1 - 2022/7/26
N2 - Taking an interdisciplinary approach to information-led exhibitions focused on performance can be considered practice-as-research historiography if curation is engaged with as praxis. Approaching exhibition curation as research praxis is a knowledge-making process, reconfiguring exhibitions as far more than a ‘pathway to impact’ designed at securing a grant. In the curation of two linked exhibitions on nineteenth-century popular entertainments at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum and University of Bristol Theatre Collection, which were stunted due to COVID-19, I developed an argument for the shared ground of exhibitions and performance. If archival objects can perform, the exhibition space itself is a stage through which they communicate embodied meanings to audiences. I explore how exhibition curation generates different epistemologies to written research by putting museum studies, performance history, audience studies and performance practice-as-research in conversation. I demonstrate how museum studies could benefit from performance in developing epistemological arguments, and how performance studies can more significantly privilege the audience in the knowledge production process. I conclude my findings by discussing how planned activities and lessons learnt from these exhibitions could provide a blueprint for practitioners interested in using the exhibition form and format to conduct historically relational practice-research inquiries in conversation with audiences.
AB - Taking an interdisciplinary approach to information-led exhibitions focused on performance can be considered practice-as-research historiography if curation is engaged with as praxis. Approaching exhibition curation as research praxis is a knowledge-making process, reconfiguring exhibitions as far more than a ‘pathway to impact’ designed at securing a grant. In the curation of two linked exhibitions on nineteenth-century popular entertainments at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum and University of Bristol Theatre Collection, which were stunted due to COVID-19, I developed an argument for the shared ground of exhibitions and performance. If archival objects can perform, the exhibition space itself is a stage through which they communicate embodied meanings to audiences. I explore how exhibition curation generates different epistemologies to written research by putting museum studies, performance history, audience studies and performance practice-as-research in conversation. I demonstrate how museum studies could benefit from performance in developing epistemological arguments, and how performance studies can more significantly privilege the audience in the knowledge production process. I conclude my findings by discussing how planned activities and lessons learnt from these exhibitions could provide a blueprint for practitioners interested in using the exhibition form and format to conduct historically relational practice-research inquiries in conversation with audiences.
U2 - 10.1080/14682761.2022.2105544
DO - 10.1080/14682761.2022.2105544
M3 - Article (Academic Journal)
SN - 1468-2761
JO - Studies in Theatre and Performance
JF - Studies in Theatre and Performance
ER -