Making Contact in an exhibition zone: Displaying contemporary cultural diversity in Donegal, Ireland, through an installation of visual and material portraits

Abstract

The ‘museum as contact zone’ (Clifford 1997: 192) has been a concept that has theoretically framed the inclusion of different cultures in museums. The contact zone concept has been revisited, for example by Boast 2011. Further, the idea of the ‘dialogic contact zone’ (Witcomb 2003; Bennett 2006) is used in relation to exhibition communication techniques that aim to establish a dialogue on cultural diversity between visitors, exhibitions and curators. This paper sets out to reframe the contact zone concept, by considering both the nature and form of contact in an exhibition. The method used is the practical curation of one exhibition by the author in Ireland called Destination Donegal. The main argument is that a curatorial production focused on individual people can create an empathetic contact zone between individual subjects and visitors, achieved through the non-verbal display language of art installation using multimedia portraits.