Staged: scenographic strategies in contemporary exhibition design

Abstract

We are pleased to introduce this special double issue, which focuses attention on how scenography operates within exhibition contexts. Our interest in this topic has been developing for some time. In 2018, we co-convened a symposium titled Scenography in Exhibition & The Museum with Kathrine Sandys and the V&A Museum, for the UK Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) Scenography Working Group. The symposium included presentations from a number of practitioners and theorists working across the disciplinary contexts of exhibition and performance design – in fact, interest in the topic was such that we shortened the length of all the presentations in order to accommodate more papers. Since then, although more scholarly work has begun to emerge in this area (Dechelle 2018; Mehzoud 2019), we believe there is still a need for a more extensive examination of the scenographic in exhibition design. This special double issue is a move towards fulfilling that need. We are delighted to feature articles by an international group of contributors. They bring a range of perspectives from the historical and cultural, art criticism, design and curatorial practices, or a combination of these. The contributors’ different perspectives interconnect to create a multi-dimensional discourse around the staging of exhibitions. Their arguments and observations elucidate how scenographic and theatrical methodologies are being used in creating what one of the contributors, Pamela Bianchi, has described as ‘the exhibition imaginary’. We have identified some emergent themes in how the assembled articles articulate a set of scenographic strategies within contexts of exhibition and display. Among these is the notion of ‘staging’ as a technique that amplifies or heightens, and in doing so draws attention to the very conditions of display. Rather than attempting to render exhibition environments and displays invisible or minimal in order to focus attention on the artefacts being displayed, this technique instead harnesses the power of exaggeration to highlight the situation of the exhibition itself. Related to this is the idea of scenography as a practice that is intentionally concerned with the ‘inauthentic’. Scenography produces fictive, imagined worlds, renders other places in the here and now, and highlights its own construction and artifice. Yet the act of simulation can also offer a critical perspective (see Brejzek 2011, 4). Rachel Hann builds on Brejzek’s identification of scenography’s otherness (2011, 5), arguing that scenography demarcates space as other than everyday (Hann 2019). In this strategy, fictive, illusory, excessive environments become devices for defamiliarization. Another common thread in the articles within this special double issue is the sense that scenography plays a key role in shaping the temporal unfolding of space in exhibitions – what a number of contributors have referred to as spatial dramaturgy. Though all spatial and visitor experience design disciplines undoubtedly involve considerations of wayfinding and circulation, scenography brings a distinct approach to these activities. When scenography is at play in the guiding of audiences through a space, it is not merely about moving from one space to another, but about creating the spatial conditions to make a performance of this