Making Contact in an exhibition zone: Displaying contemporary cultural diversity in Donegal, Ireland, through an installation of visual and material portraits

摘要

The 'museum as contact zone' (Clifford 1997: 192) has been a concept that hastheoretically framed the inclusion of different cultures in museums. The contactzone concept has been revisited, for example by Boast 2011. Further, the ideaof the 'dialogic contact zone' (Witcomb 2003; Bennett 2006) is used in relationto exhibition communication techniques that aim to establish a dialogue oncultural diversity between visitors, exhibitions and curators. This paper sets outto reframe the contact zone concept, by considering both the nature and form ofcontact in an exhibition. The method used is the practical curation of oneexhibition by the author in Ireland called Destination Donegal. The mainargument is that a curatorial production focused on individual people can createan empathetic contact zone between individual subjects and visitors, achievedthrough the non-verbal display language of art installation using multimediaportraits