What Are Exhibitions For?

Abstract

This book is topical at a time when visitors, especially youth, are seeking immersive experiences. More importantly museums, particularly in the United Kingdom, are seeking ways to shift the colonial gaze that objectifies, and the top-down power that comes with it. The CEO of Culture, Dr. Errol Francis, highlighted how the racially spurred violence perpetrated by police in 2020 in the U.S. and the UK emphasized the need to reexamine colonial violence within heritage spaces, including museums. What are exhibitions for? challenges perceptions of contemporary exhibitions by a reversal of power from the curator to the visitor, thus looking at what exhibitions could be—“technologies of the imagination.” Although Inge Daniels does not refer to the term “decolonization” of museum spaces, there are statements to be discovered within the dense text of the book that are in alignment with this thinking. What is also of relevance is Daniels’s acknowledgement of different ways of knowing, or what she refers to as “mixed knowledge making.” Knowing through your feet is a strong theme throughout the book, as is reflected in the cover which includes a plan of the movement of visitors’ feet through an exhibition. Daniels’s attempts to address and transform essentialist stereotyping of Japanese life. She steps away from the inclusion of museum artifacts as singular objects of worth that are stuck behind glass, to consumable collections from the domestic space within which visitors may engage in a performative or tactile manner. Daniels, who had conducted ongoing research in Japan for over 20 years— including in 30 homes in the Kansai region—writes the book in the first person. She implements an anthropological approach, including interviews and participant observation, to an experimental exhibition entitled “At Home in Japan – Beyond the Minimal House.” She co-curated that exhibition, along with the photographer and lecturer, Susan Andrews, who provided life-size trompe l’œil photographs to heighten visitors’ immersive experiences. This exhibition occurred from March to August 2011 at the Geffrye Museum in London. The anthropological approach of the book includes ethnographic studies of the multi-sensory immersive reception of the exhibition, as well as the journey of objects from the exhibition which Daniels surprisingly raffled off to