ABSTRACT
Analysing bodily and material engagements with museum objects and spaces, this chapter draws on debates in anthropology, material culture and museum studies, combined with museum practice, to explore ways in which museum objects and spaces are undergoing critical reconceptualisation, and re-presentation. Just as objects are being reconsidered in these fields, museum practices are enabling similarly critical and searching exploration of objects through diverse visual, material and display strategies. Museum spaces are being reinterpreted in terms of their social, cultural, political and sensory dimensions, as museums are undergoing significant shifts in their rationales, agendas, display strategies and architectures. This chapter examines current discussions of “objects” and “spaces”, and situates these in relation to an exhibition and an installation which I devised and curated in 2015–2016 and 2017. The former displayed experiments undertaken in the design of 3D models for medical education, and the latter more explicitly put experimental methods and display techniques into action in a vacated anatomy department of a medical school. Both exhibition and installation formed modes of anthropological research conducted through museum practice that critically explored categories of, and distinctions between, objects and spaces.
