‘Storage Exhibitions’ in Permanent Museum Collections

Abstract

'Storage exhibitions' refer to staged storage areas displayed within a museum's permanent collection. What is the purpose of displaying these storage spaces within a museum's collection? I hypothesise that they are above all interpretive spaces intended to extend the dialogue between the museum and the public. A study of three cases (the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and Kunsthalle Mannheim) reveals the different functions performed by these exhibitions. They can show how museums work to preserve the heritage of their communities or they can give view on the work carried out by the museum’s professionals itself. The study also illustrates how such exhibitions offer a lens through which to understand and explore a given institution’s exhibitions and collections. Ultimately, each case is led by a sense of critical reflexivity that extends the display of museum objects to the display of the work carried out in the museum itself, hence opening up the nature of the museum’s work to the general public.

Keywords:

• exhibition
• open storage
• critical
• reflexivity
• new museology

Notes

1 As Noémie Drouguet underlines, ‘Arranging rooms in museums as if they were storerooms is a very different proposition from arranging certain parts of storerooms to prolong the exhibition’ (2012, p. 47).

2 This was the wish of Pinacoteca di Brera Director James Bradburne, appointed in 2015.

3 The explanatory texts that appear here are taken from the English-language signs displayed throughout the museums.

4 Sign: ‘The Apology’, voiced by Jack Thompson, produced by Reconciliation Australia, 2008; duration: five minutes.

5 Note that the two types of ‘display cases’ do not function exactly the same way; the restoration ‘box’ takes up a large amount of space (it is located right in the middle of a large room) in which one can see restorers at work.

6 Author’s emphasis.

7 James Bradburne first tested these innovative principles in designing the New Metropolis science centre in Amsterdam (Bradburne 1998).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gaëlle Crenn

Gaëlle Crenn is a Lecturer in Information and Communication Science at the University of Lorraine, France, and a member of the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM). Her work focuses on heritage-creation processes and contemporary transformations in science and society museums. Her past work includes a study of representations of otherness in anthropology museums in Europe and the Pacific. Other areas of interest include museum scenography and interpretation. She recently co-edited the ‘Emotion in Exhibitions’ series for Culture et Musées (No. 36, 2020, with Jean-Christophe Vilatte).