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Peter Bjerregaard: Exhibitions as Research

Peter Bjerregaard, editor of the Routledge anthology, Exhibitions as Research: Experimental Methods in Museums (2020), will introduce his model for knowledge-making in exhibitions, which he dubs collapsology

Info about event

Time

Monday 3 February 2020,  at 14:15 - 16:00

The notion of the exhibition as an act of research is not in itself new, but how this conception is exercised in the context of the museum and what it means is yet to be substantially developed. How can we exhibit something that is still in the making? What concepts of knowledge apply to such a situation? And how are we to conceive of the role of audiences? These are some of the questions that the new Routledge anthology, Exhibitions as Research: Experimental Methods in Museums (2020) sets out to answer.

The first 2020-meeting of the Contemporary Aesthetics and Technology (CAT) research programme welcomes editor of the volume, Peter Bjerregaard, who will introduce the anthology with specific focus on his own contribution. Bjerregaard proposes a model for knowledge-making entitled collapsology: a process where our conceptual knowledge is shattered and we are asked to construct a new set of relations, a new meaningful order by activating an aesthetic approach. Bjerregaard suggests that this kind of collapsology releases what Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) has called a “savage” kind of thinking, a logic based in perception, rather than in abstract concepts. In this way exhibition-making adds to what we may know by transgressing our everyday understanding of how the world is constituted.

The meeting is open to everyone interested. As preparation for the meeting, we will be reading Bjerregaard’s introduction to the volume as well as his own article, “Exhibition-making as Aesthetic Inquiry”. Please contact Trine Friis Sørensen (trinefs@cc.au.dk) to receive the texts.

Peter Bjerregaard holds a PhD in Anthropology (AU & Moesgaard Museum) and was recently appointed Program Manager of The Danish Museum for Science and Technology in Helsingør. Previously, he was Senior Adviser of Exhibitions at Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. His research interests pertain to the exhibition as a particular mode of research and developing experimental approaches to exhibition-making that allow research to materialize in non-textual forms. He was project leader and curator of a number of exhibitions, among them COLLAPSE – Human Being in an Unpredictable World and Letting go. Together with Anders Emil Rasmussen and Tim Flohr Sørensen he edited Materialities of Passing: Explorations in Transformation, Transition and Transience (2016).