Fifteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The museum of the twenty-first century is operating against the backdrop of ongoing social concerns pertaining to climate change, gender inequalities and racial tensions, and often exhibitions become the contact zones where those expressions are formulated. This research analyses how a democratic and inclusive philosophical approach such as the Tigens Metod (or method of the thing) is executed by museum professionals. In doing so Stuart Hall’s model of encoding/decoding is applied as the theoretical framework as it investigates the process of exhibition production in Swedish museums. It is argued that occasionally resistant positions can emerge from the museum’s ideological discourse as key actors within the museum field yield different codes according to their own framework of knowledge and relations of production. This challenges the basic assumption in Hall’s model that media institutions yield one singular preferred code into the system. The paper concludes that an object-oriented democracy has the potential of challenging power structures, albeit this is still contingent upon the choices made by museum professionals.