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Biomedicine in museums

Exhibitions shall be argumentative and seductive!

By October 13, 2008No Comments

Our own Camilla Mordhorst has been interviewed in the last issue of Riksutställningar’s newsletter (in Swedish). Most exhibitions in cultural history are amazingly traditional, she claims. The Wellcome Collection in London is one of the few which have developed new, exciting narrative techniques, and so has the World Culture Museum in Gothenburg. But otherwise most museums seem to be afraid of experimenting too much. Camilla suggests that museums shall “give visitors a brainstorm instead of a linear time-flow”, a kind of ”additive narration” she calls it. She also points to the problem with invisible curators; facts and artefacts are often presented in a way so that visitors cannot see how they were chosen: “When you cut out the sender you inhibit the language of the exhibition”. Finally, as a curator you don’t have to be subjective, but neither should you pretend to be neutral: “Like a good article, an exhibition has to be argumentative and seductive: it shall be carried forward by statements, either simple or complex”.

Thomas Söderqvist

Author Thomas Söderqvist

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