'Veil' and the politics of community exhibiting: some thoughts from Glasgow

Abstract

This paper is broadly concerned with community engagement as a facet of museum practice. The paper offers a reading of a community exhibition entitled Curious, held at St Mungo’s Museum of Religious Life and Art in the city of Glasgow. I take the reader on a tour of the exhibition, offering insights into its form and function. I show how community exhibitions can pose challenges to traditional museum practice by disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions about curatorial authority, and I emphasize both the range of meanings that can be attached to museum objects and the radical potential of including non-expert knowledge in the creation of displays and exhibitions. I also argue, however, that community exhibitions may be understood as poor relations to traditionally curated exhibits, and that curatorial authority is still key to the production of museum displays.