I believe that research and practice enhance each other, and I have undertaken research throughout my career. I am particularly interested in the impact of institutional contexts and working practices on cultural production, developing new forms of narration, and the impact of visual language on framing audiences.
My research is embedded in practice. It is multi-disciplinary, synthesising approaches from sociology, anthropology, linguistics, literary, film and architectural theories and translation studies.
Completed research
My doctoral research came out of my many years as a practitioner. While it focusses on exhibition production, the findings are more broadly applicable to other production processes. I examined exhibition production in the context of institutional transformation, where the museums concerned wanted to change or enhance their identity, or try a new approach to their displays. My research showed that in order for any production to be successful, an organisation must tailor its processes and practices to the specific project, rather than use a standardised approach. It also indicated the circumstances under which this is likely to happen.
I developed two parallel theorisations of exhibition production:
- a sociology of exhibition production describing detailed working practices and their impact on the production, including how team members are brought together, motivations for taking part, how roles are defined, power relationships within and without the team, communication between groups and the conditions needed for an organisation to change its practices.
- a visual language for exhibitions, that describes the translation between concept and content ideas (developed in written language) and the exhibition design (developed in a spatial and visual language).
I applied these to case studies of three recent redisplays at London-based national museums: Tate Modern’s inaugural exhibitions, the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum, and the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art at the V&A. This part of the research was carried out using archive research and interviews.
My thesis is not publicly available due to third party copyright for some of the images, but if you would like to read a copy, please contact me.
Current projects
I am currently (autumn 2023) developing a project to explore how exhibitions can display multiple narratives simultaneously with minimal mediation from the curatorial team. This is particularly important for discussing contemporary and / or controversial topics in an exhibition environment. I hope to be working with community-based contemporary collections teams as part of this work.
Rachel Souhami 