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Staging exhibitions: atmospheres of imagination

The article is one of thirty-two in a collection based on papers first given at the international conference, ‘Narrative Space’, Departments of Architecture/Built Environment, University of Nottingham and School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, the leading UK department in museum studies and museology. Both collection and research contexts address a growing reinvention in design practices in shaping museum displays around ‘narrative environments’ in new experiences of objects, space and display contexts that significantly challenge curatorial/institutional narrative impositions and strategies. Crawley’s study makes an important contribution to this broader problematic in examining how concepts of the explicitly theatrical and scenographic are deployed in contemporary exhibition and museum displays. Building on her earlier published research on war scenography, her article develops and expands this framework of interests. Taking two recent exhibitions at the V&A, one at the Casson Mann museolobby in Moscow and the ‘Atalanta’ performance, a Creative Campus Initiative commission for the Ashmolean Museum, the article sets out a convincing case for their use of theatrical concepts of staging/lighting, ‘performance’ and mise-en-scène as tools for new types of experiential narratives that create alternative possibilities for meaning and interpretation. Crawley clearly posits altered relations between ‘curators’ and spectators through scenographic devices.