Exhibitions and the Formation of Knowledge

n what sense is an exhibition the basis for knowledge? I ask myself the question because I have, for the fi rst time, curated a large show comprising major loans — the result of a long academic project entitled Empires of Faith (based at the British Museum and in Wolfson College, Oxford). The exhibition, called Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of World Religions , explores the ways the visual iden-tities of the world religions were formed during the fi rst millennium through interaction, dialogue, encounter, and self-conscious differ-entiation through divergence. 1 The curatorial team has focused on the formative periods in the arts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Ju-daism, and Christianity across Eurasia from India to Ireland. The result has been on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford between October 2017 and February 2018.