ABSTRACT
Exhibitions are usually understood in anthropology as representation techniques; however, they can also be used as a mode of inquiry. This piece outlines how to approach displays not simply as attempts to communicate research findings or existing social issues, but as a device to challenge, invent or critically question a reality – being part of an ongoing reconfiguration of what knowledge and the political could be. By making use of exhibitions as experimental devices, we can display our concerns and make the ethnographic field happen in an inventive collaborative way. This mode of inquiry helps ethnographers to construct more distributed settings of knowledge production, operating as both an object of inquiry and a device available to different actors for acting-knowing. Hence, it can be practiced to open up a space between knowledge and invention, as well as new ways of being in the field.
