Visible Listening – letting other voices into the exhibition.
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Visible Listening

letting other voices into the exhibition.  


Visitors often leave exhibitions feeling at best inadequate, at worst, plain stupid. Exhibition texts have traditionally been written by curators, but are rarely, if ever, attributed, and are often written in a dispassionate, third-person ‘voice of god’, as if the statements of the curator were fragments of Absolute Truth. No matter how sensitive the curator, it is almost impossible for them to recover the state in which they didn’t know their subject – the natural situation of nearly every visitor. The exhibition space should be enriched by other, non-curatorial voices alongside the curator’s labels, and by inviting visitors to add their own voices to the exhibition. This approach is called ‘visible listening’.