Exhibition curation as practice-as-research performance historiography: an incomplete story of audience experience

Abstract

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to information-led exhibitions that are focused on performance can be considered a form of 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, the process of which was stunted due the COVID-19 pandemic, I developed an argument for the shared ground of exhibitions and performance. If archival objects can perform, then the exhibition space itself is a stage through which they communicate embodied meanings to audiences. In this article, 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. In particular, I demonstrate how museum studies could benefit by borrowing from performance to develop epistemological arguments, and in turn, 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.