| Abstract: | In a way, museums and exhibitions can be taken as symptoms of knowledge and image construction. Exhibitions as places of (visual) representations reflect current cultural narrations and images of society — the conscious and the hidden or unconscious ones. In general, these narratives which are mediated on a visual level are neither reflected nor identified as social constructions. In this context, I tried to analyze displays of four exhibitions focusing on the categories gender and “the other”, on the way these categories are addressed or left out and by which visual means. The central idea of this investigation of the production of meanings within complex exhibiting procedures is to turn the means of staging themselves into an object of analysis, that is, to find out which methods of production consciously or unconsciously transmit which contents. The aim of this paper is to reveal (hidden) discourses that are produced and mediated through visual methods, to heighten the awareness of processes in visual culture by which cultural and social codes are accredited and approved of and to claim responsibility for these representations. |
