Making things matter. Meaning and materiality in museum displays

Abstract

An international and trans-institutional study, the present postdoctoral project analyses the production of prehistory, art history and cultural history in various museum displays in Berlin, Copenhagen, London and Stockholm, from c. 1880 to c. 1920. The collection galleries and permanent exhibitions are analysed as interfaces of meaning and materiality, with a focus on the different concepts of knowledge that were brought into play when making history, namely scholarly knowledge, aesthetic experience, didactic learning, technical expertise and notions of how to live well. More specifically, the project combines two theoretical perspectives, the poetics of display and displays as mediations, and analyses how museums made history through more or less locally decided interconnections of moral models, display techniques, historical remains and reproductions, and didactic, epistemological and aesthetic ideas. The three-year project, 2015–2018, is conducted partly in the aforesaid cities, and chiefly at the Centre for Museum Studies, IKOS, University of Oslo.