Academic knowledge on display. A study on historical and recent exhibitions of university collections

The collecting, organising, exploring and exhibiting of material objects has a long history in the realm of the sciences. Interestingly, university collections have garnered increasing public and scientific attention in recent years. The first university museum in Germany – the Königliches Academisches Museum or Royal Academic Museum – was founded in Göttingen in 1773. Since then, although its collections have been designed primarily for scholarly use and intended for educational purposes, they have always also been presented to the public at various locations throughout the university, such as in cabinets, corridors, historical rooms, exhibition cases, galleries, as anniversary or theme-oriented exhibitions and often as part of guided tours.

The research project “Academic knowledge on display” is dedicated to this abundant exhibition history as well as to present-day academic collections that oscillate between performing representative functions and being embedded in scientific processes and activities. Today, this tension is more topical than ever. For example, contemporary exhibition planning and concepts – such as the work being done at the HUMBOLDT LABOR in Berlin, the FORUM WISSEN in Göttingen and the GUM in Gent – place the emphasis not only on their collections, with all their fascinating treasures, prominent scholars, great inventors and histories of various disciplines and universities; for quite some time now, these exhibitions have also started to question and explore scientific practices themselves, including collecting, ordering, researching, teaching, travelling, measuring, experimenting, error-making and cooperating. Instead of presenting a progress oriented history of science and institutions, current exhibitions recently focus on the history of researching, that is, on the emergence of knowledge in its arbitrary, collective and historically variable, dynamic forms. For example, at the FORUM WISSEN, work is being done on an object lab (see fig.) that will function as a collection showcase and seminar space at the same time; this will create an area where objects can be arranged temporarily and examined in an interdisciplinary manner. The goal of a lab like this is not to exhibit and establish knowledge or to objectify it in any way; instead, the aim is to render visible the struggle for objective knowledge and the material conditionality of knowledge.

In this sense, the exhibition concept is in line with a critical approach to representation – one that has been formulated in many ways since the second half of the 20th century. Indeed, it has been activist, feminist and post-colonial debates, above all, that have questioned and problematised the representation of universal history and scientific and knowledge-generating truths. Since the emergence of these critiques, exhibition gestures have themselves been increasingly questioned for their role in reinforcing hegemonial categorisations and power structures in what might be referred to as a crisis of museum-related representation. This post-doctoral research project examines how these debates, struggles and conflicts are taken up and negotiated in historical and contemporary designs of university and knowledge-based museums. What is the relationship between knowledge production and knowledge representation? How can the process of conducting research be exhibited instead of displaying “merely” the results of that research? To what extent can the exhibition space itself become a site of research?

If academic collections have contributed considerably to the genesis, establishment and differentiation of scientific disciplines and subject identities in the past, today they promise once again the opportunity for self-reflection on the sciences. Such an inquiry is also being called for in the museum environment in the form of a questioning of the institutional, political, cultural and economic conditions of knowledge. In any case, both institutions – the museum and the university – can benefit and learn from the openness and latency of epistemic objects that make exhibitions into sites of social and scientific activity.

Cooperation partner: Centre for Collection Development, Georg August University Göttingen

Image: Object laboratory and collection showcase (chezweitz, Berlin) | © Universität Göttingen