A Brief Journey through Definitions of Contemporary Exhibition Design: From Display to Narrative and Back

Contemporary exhibition design is a fascinating and innovative project discipline that constitutes an ideal place of confluence of multiple knowledge bases and as many ways of expressing culture. Its task is “to expose knowledge,” and this article investigates its current state of the art, looking at its possible research field definitions, deepening above all its “narrative” nature. The latter, in fact, represents its current state of conceptual and executive evolution, in a continuous round trip between tale evocation and displaying objects. The thematic focus of this article is to attempt to gather and intersect the different aspects and disciplines involved in contemporary exhibition design. Its aim is based on the acknowledgment of a selection of the existing literature. Due to the complex topic, as highlighted by the title, the result is a “brief journey” through definitions of contemporary exhibition design. This journey is made by the choice of many “voices” that are representative of the different professional figures who contribute to the construction of possible reasoning on the evolution of contemporary exhibition design: architects, exhibition designers, artists, curators, and art and architecture critics.