ABSTRACT
In his essay on ‘Culture and representation’ in the volume Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display Ivan Karp proposes that:
Cross-cultural exhibitions present such stark contrasts between what we know and what we need to know that the challenge of reorganising our knowledge becomes an aspect of the exhibition experience. This challenge may be experienced in its strongest form in cross-cultural exhibitions, but it should be raised by any exhibition. Almost by definition, audiences do not bring to exhibitions the full range of cultural resources necessary for comprehending them; otherwise there would be no point in exhibiting. Audiences are left with two choices: either they define their experience of the exhibition to fit with their existing categories of knowledge, or they reorganise their categories to fit better with their experience. Ideally, it is the shock of non-recognition that enables the audience to choose the latter alternative. The challenge to exhibition makers is to provide within exhibitions the contexts and resources that enable audiences to choose to reorganise their knowledge.
(Karp 1991: 22)