Exhibitions tell stories: a plea for literary understanding of Museum exhibition spaces, using the example Mitte in Berlin

Museum exhibitions behave like literary narratives and can therefore be analysed using narrative theory methods and concepts. This book seeks to substantiate this fundamental thesis and apply it in an exemplary manner. The focal point here is not the now established cultural texture à la Clifford Geertz, but rather the spatial arrangement as a meaning-generating, aestheticised network of relationships that takes the place of the narrative to be read. The poetic quality that arises from the deliberate combination of words in literature is reflected in the arrangement of objects. In and precisely through the spatial "in-between" of the objects, a mediating instance is constituted that resembles the narrative instance of narrative texts in essential respects. Literary studies offer a methodological "toolbox" that corresponds to this poeticised and mediated character of (museum) exhibitions. This opens up new possibilities for a critical and scientifically transparent analysis of exhibitions.

Pagina's: 52, Paperback, Our Knowledge Publishing