The focus of this research study is on major art works produced during the nineteen-nineties by the Romanian collective subREAL, composed of Calin Dan and Josif Kiraly. The thesis is an alternative to the literal-minded and politically biased Western view typified in two major exhibitions of art from Eastern Europe: Beyond Belief: Contemporary Art from East Central Europe (Chicago, 1995) and After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe (Sweden, 1999). Both exhibitions presented Post-Communist nations as a monolithic bloc, in which art was primarily a passive reflection of political and social events. It will be demonstrated that such exhibitions had consciously promoted this polarizing Western interpretation of the former socialist cultures of Eastern Europe. By contrast, the argument presented here is that subREAL did not merely transmit information and facts from remote lands, but rather explored satire as the way to engage the world around them.

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This thesis bridges narrative theory and the practice of developing narrative exhibitions in museums. It aims to show how an understanding of narrative theory provides a dynamic context for evaluating ongoing exhibition practices and adapting them to changing attitudes and aspirations. For practitioners within the museum sector it introduces a rich body of previously under-utilised scholarship along with a method of interfacing it with museum practice. The idea of deriving ideas for museums from other sectors is not new. Museums increasingly embraced narrative in the 1980s after seeing its value in attracting audiences to film, theatre and theme-parks. Then it was assumed that what was relevant in one sector would be equally relevant in another. However, the interim upsurge of Media Studies suggests that rigorous examination of how each medium operates is necessary in order to identify similar constraints and affordances before scholarship from one area of practice can be appropriately applied in another sector. In opening a path for museum practitioners to gain insight from narrative practitioners in other sectors, the thesis intends also to open the way for knowledge to flow from the discipline of museum studies out into other areas of narrative practice, where cross-disciplinary approaches have already gained ground. At the outset, a context is established through a review of narrative literature. Two different approaches are used. Firstly a broad review of different ways to approach narrative is carried out and a typology of narrative is developed. Secondly commonalities are identified between narrative in exhibitions and narrative practice in other media. Exhibition practices are then described in detail, focusing on experience at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, where research was enriched by in-depth interviews with exhibition development staff. Te Papa’s development of narrative exhibitions is traced, and two case studies demonstrate how their model is put into practice to achieve narrative delivery within the museum galleries. For museum professionals and narrative practitioners in other fields, this thesis provides an opportunity to examine processes of narrative delivery against a backdrop of theory. It makes a useful link between the museum sector and other areas of narrative practice.

This study unites the burgeoning academic field of exhibition histories and the critiques of race-based exhibition practices that crystallised in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. It concerns recent practices of presenting and contextualising black creativity in British publicly funded art museums and galleries that are part of a broader attempt to increase the diversity of histories and perspectives represented in public art collections and exhibitions. The research focuses on three concurrent 2010 exhibitions that aimed to offer a non-hegemonic reading of black creativity through the use of non-art-historical conceptual and alternative curatorial models: Afro Modern (Tate Liverpool), Action (The Bluecoat), and a retrospective of works by Chris Ofili (Tate Britain). Comparative exhibitions of the past were typically premised on concepts of difference that ultimately resulted in the notional separation of black artists from mainstream discourses on contemporary art and histories of British art. Through a close and critical textual analysis of these three recent exhibitions, which is informed by J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts (1955), the study considers whether, and to what extent the delimiting curatorial practices of the past have been successfully abandoned by public art museums and galleries, and furthermore, whether it has been possible for British art institutions to reject the entrenched, exclusive conceptions of British culture that negated black contributions to the canon and narratives of British art in the first place. The exhibition case studies are complemented and contextualised by an in-depth history of the Bluecoat’s engagement with black creativity between 1976 and 2012, which provides a particular insight into the ways that debates about representation, difference and separatism have impacted the policies and practices of one culturally significant art gallery that is frequently overlooked in histories of black British art. With reference to the notion of legitimate coercion as defined by Zygmunt Bauman (2000), the study determines that long-standing hegemonic structures continue to inform the modes through which public art museums and galleries in Britain curate and control black creativity.