Sharon Macdonald & Paul Basu 
Exhibition Experiments 

Exhibition Experiments is a lively collection that considers experiments with museological form that challenge our understanding of – and experience with – museums.

* Explores examples of museum experimentalism in light of cutting-edge museum theory

* Draws on a range of global and topical examples, including museum experimentation, exhibitionary forms, the fate of conventional notions of ‘object’ and ‘representation’, and the impact of these changes

* Brings together an international group of art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists to question traditional disciplinary boundaries

* Considers the impact of technology on the museum space
tackles a range of examples of experimentalism from many different countries, including Australia, Austria, Germany, Israel, Luxembourg, Sweden, the UK and the US

* Examines the changes and challenging new possibilities facing museum studies

Table of Content

Table of Contents.

1. Experiments in Exhibition, Ethnography, Art and Science.

Paul Basu and Sharon Macdonald.

2. Legibility and Affect: Museums as New Media.

Michelle Henning.

3. The Labrynthine Aesthetic in Contemporary Museum Design.

Paul Basu.

4. Exhibition as Film.

Mieke Bal.

5. Experimenting with Representation: Iconoclash! and Making
Things Public.

Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour.

6. Walking on a Story Board, Performing Shared Incompetence.
Exhibiting ‘Science’ in the Public Realm.

Xperiment! – Bernd Kraeftner, Judith Kroell, and Isabel
Warner.

7. From Capital to Enthusiasm: an Exhibitionary Practice.

Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska.

8. The Politics of Display. Ann-Sofi Sidén’s WARTE
MAL!, Art History and Social Documentary.

A seminar with Laura Bear, Clare Carolin, Griselda Pollock and
Ann-Sofi Sidén. Edited by Clare Carolin and Cathy Haynes.

9. From Exhibiting to Installing Ethnography: Experiments at the
Museum of Anthropology of the University of Coimbra (Portugal)
1999-2005.

Nuno Porto.

10. Raising Specters: Welcoming Hybrid Phantoms at
Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry.

Anne Lorimer.

11. Exposing Expo: exhibition entrepreneurship and experimental
reflexivity in late modernity.

Alexa Färber

About the author

Sharon Macdonald is Professor of Social Anthropology at the
University of Manchester. She is author of Behind the Scenes at
the Science Museum (2002), and editor of A Companion to
Museum Studies (Blackwell 2006) and Theorizing Museums
(with G. Fyfe, Blackwell 1996).

Paul Basu is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University
of Sussex. An active exhibition experimenter, he is author of
Highland Homecomings (2007).