The Exhibitionary Form: Tentacular notes on the exhibition, its design, and world-building in the ruins of representation

This PhD explores what I call ‘the exhibitionary form’ and posits that any exhibition’s design generates political, social and ontological affects. I argue that the modern exhibition’s form was designed in order to help further modernity’s conception of the world based on binary separation. The subject-object binary was not invented in an exhibition space, but the exhibition has been a vehicle through which it has settled into social culture. Surrounded by forms that respond to a particular understanding of reality, what we believe is possible becomes circumscribed to what the activation and usage of those forms permit. The aim of conceptualising exhibitionary forms is suffused by the hope that, by analysing them as microontological agents, I might shed light on how modernity as a socio-cultural phenomenon is unraveling. I explore eight contemporary examples where the form and design digress from a modern agenda: I study these with the practitioners that helped create them and together, we tentacularly shape the contours of what a different, more-than-modern exhibitionary form could be like. My research question has led me to conclude that in employing morethanmodern exhibitionary forms, society constructs and furthers more-than-modern worldviews, where the so-called subjects and objects of representation are indistinct and shapeshifting.