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Understanding Visitor-Centredness in Contemporary
Exhibition-Making
Exhibition-Making
Once a peripheral figure, the visitor has gained new significance in exhibition-making. Across a range of cultural settings, from major museums to private galleries, audiences are no longer cast as passive recipients of knowledge, but participants whose presence and perspectives are shaping how exhibitions are presented. This shift responds to broader cultural demands for open dialogue and inclusivity, emerging from the rise of participatory culture and the increasing pressure on institutions to demonstrate responsiveness and public value in a competitive cultural sector.
Visitors matter, yet ‘the visitor’ is a flexible category. The nature of visitor-centredness varies greatly across the landscape. While some exhibitions invite visitors to take part in the dialogue, others focus on creating embodied experiences. In this sense, the visitor's role is not defined by a single model, but stretches across a spectrum, from hands-on participation to more subtle forms of engagement. Cultural institutions aren’t responding to a single, unified shift but instead are navigating a transitional phase, one shaped by different goals, resources and audiences.
Two recent exhibitions offer a way to explore how this shift is playing out in practice: The Art Gallery of New South Wales’ (AGNSW) recent retrospective blockbuster Cao Fei: My City is Yours and commercial gallerist Nanda\Hobbs’ intimate Long Dawn by Lottie Consalvo. Though operating at very different corners of the art world, both exhibitions are reimagining the role of the viewer. They highlight how ideas of viewer-centrenedess are being interpreted in different institutional contexts, from one equipped to reach broad audiences with large-scale, immersive experiences, to one grounded in relational engagement through a focus on education programming. Examining these approaches reveals how institutions are not only adapting to changing expectations, but also actively shaping what cultural participation looks like, and who it is ultimately for.
The Evolving Role of Visitors
Exhibitions have long reflected the ideologies of the institutions that produce them. Historically, museums held significant authority over how art and culture is presented, shaping not only what is shown, but how it is interpreted and by whom. The birth of the public museum in the 17th and 18th centuries marked the moment when culture became framed as a public good. Influenced by Enlightenment ideals, private collections were reorganised and made accessible to an increasingly educated bourgeois society, layering a new civic purpose into previous displays that affirmed wealth and social power. The public museum became a space for moral and civic construction, recasting the visitor from wealthy nobles to informed citizens, designed to serve the museum's cultural truths.
From the 19th century to the early 20th century, museums became increasingly entangled with the nation-state, serving as instruments for national legitimacy. This preservation of heritage reinforced dominant narratives of identity and authority, shaping visitors into national subjects who internalised cultural hierarchies, seeing themselves reflected in a curated vision of privilege and achievement. Rather than standing apart from society, museums actively participated in legitimising the power structures of their time, encoding them into their displays and audiences.
However, by the mid-20th century, a confluence of political and social changes began to challenge these authorities, driven by post-war democratic reforms and civil rights movements. Museums rebranded themselves as inclusive educational institutions; a site of learning and enjoyment with a pedagogical role aimed at serving a broader public . This ideological shift marked a new trajectory in museological thought, as ongoing cultural and political movements called for greater inclusivity and accountability. Today, visitors are no longer cast solely as passive observers, but are increasingly considered central to exhibition experiences. In many ways, this reimagining represents the progressive turn in the landscape, creating a space for visitors to express themselves and participate in shaping cultural meaning. A conceptual shift towards what is known as the post-museum, a model where museums act not as gatekeepers but spaces of open dialogue and shared meaning-making.
What emerges is a dynamic and continuously evolving relationship between the public and the cultural landscape, one where power is no longer assumed but actively negotiated. While post-museum theory provides a powerful conceptual framework for rethinking institutional practice, what it means to be “visitor-centred” varies widely, and is continually shaped by how museums define their purpose and imagine their audiences. Understanding this dialogue is crucial to examining how institutions perceive the visitor’s role today, and how they position them within their exhibitions and broader cultural agendas.
Modes of Visitor-Centredness
There is no singular way to centre the visitor in exhibition-making, because the visitor is not a singular subject. Audiences bring different expectations, backgrounds and capacities for engagement. Visitor-centredness then, is not a fixed strategy but a dynamic set of responses to this variability. The task becomes less about designing a consistent message, and more about designing frameworks that support diverse and meaningful models of engagement. This can look different from one context to another, as the shape of visitor-centred practice is influenced by a range of factors, from institutional goals to the audiences exhibitions seek to engage. Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model, successful visitor-centred exhibitions are those that remain adaptable, and respond to the particularities of place, audience and moment.
In public museums, visitor-centred exhibitions are increasingly realised through engagement strategies that are enabled by cultural capital, allowing institutions to stage ambitious, experiential encounters designed to attract broader and more diverse audiences. In its recent expansion, the AGNSW signals a commitment to contemporary and inclusive programming for its audience. The recent blockbuster retrospective Cao Fei: My City is Yours, housed within the purpose-built Naala Badu building, presents a clear gesture towards this ethos of inclusivity. The exhibition unfolds as an open, yet sequenced urban imaginary which reflects the complexities of China’s urban and digital transformations, exploring themes of nostalgia and identity. Across works visitors are invited to explore an immersive, city-like virtual dreamscape. From the reconstructed Jiuxianqiao neighbourhood, to the nostalgic remnants of the Hongxia factory, to the digital architecture of RMB City, environments are not just viewed, but moved through, activating visitors spatially as they transition media and moods, encountering both personal and collective narratives.
These spatial and sensory displays offer a form of embodied engagement, where meaning is shaped by how the visitors move through and emotionally connect with the material and with each other. This is especially prevalent in the exhibition's three major site-specific works. Golden wattle is a deeply personal tribute dedicated to Cao’s late sister, which uses archival photographs and family ephemera to share a familial experience, engaging the emotional dimensions of memory and loss. Hip hop: Sydney’s community-driven music video and the reconstruction of Sydney’s historical yum cha restaurant, the Marigold, both reflect on Sydney’s multiculturalism. These works mobilise collective performance and visual storytelling to centre community memory and identity, evoking a sense of belonging and cultural visibility that invites visitors to engage with narrative through recognition and shared history.
Affective-experiential exhibitions help foster a pedagogy of feeling that helps connect visitors more deeply to meaning-making. Visitors don't learn about migration and multiculturalism, they are instead invited to feel them, to experience their complexities through spatial metaphors and personal resonance. Embodied strategies are an effective engagement strategy for public museums to engage with wide and diverse audiences because they appeal to something universal – emotion. A deeply accessible entry point, engaging affect enables immersive, sensory experiences which transcend barriers that traditional instructive methods cannot always reach, allowing visitors to connect on a visceral level regardless of background or prior knowledge.
While public museums like AGNSW play a visible role in shaping visitor-centred practices, they are not the only spaces where meaningful engagement occurs. The broader art ecosystem encompasses a wide range of platforms, from artist-run initiatives to commercial galleries. These spaces are equally vital in redefining how audiences connect with contemporary art. In these contexts, smaller-scale exhibitions aren’t built around large-scale immersion, nor do they aim to be. Instead, visitor-centredness takes shape through dialogue-driven encounters and relationship building rooted in place and community.
Australian artist Lottie Consalvo’s Long Dawn at Nanda\Hobbs highlights how engagement emerges through opportunities for knowledge exchange and direct dialogue. Tucked off the streets of Chippendale, in the heart of Sydney’s growing urban art district, Long Dawn invites visitors into a gently drawn contemplative space. Consalvo’s practice asks us not to decode symbols, but to sit with their ambiguity and feel the way through knowing and unknowing. This intention is reflected in the exhibition's spatial design, where paintings are given breathing room, each framed in raw textures of wood. The centre of the gallery, which is a clear siteline from the entrance to the back, removes distraction and positions the viewer in a space that feels open-ended and introspective, acting as an invitation to think and feel alongside the artist in real time.
Engagement, however, becomes most cohesive when it is built in collaboration with this spatial openness. The exhibition functions not as a fixed destination, but a threshold for a broader field of thoughtful exchange and shared inquiry. Combined with an active digital presence through online avenues, such as an Instagram and monthly art newsletters, engagement is at the forefront of the gallery’s public programming. The in-gallery conversation with Consalvo and curator Gina Mobayed, invites visitors into shared gallery space. Structured as an open conversation rather than lecture, the format created space for open dialogue about Consalvo’s conceptual work and opportunities to connect directly with her work. Here, the visitor is not framed as a collaborator in the institutional sense, but neither are they a passive observer. Instead they move from potential buyer to an engaged interlocutor, someone whose intellectual presence and curiosity is valued and a part of the gallery’s cultural purpose. Visitor-centredness emerges from the gallery’s intentional efforts to create meaningful encounters for audiences new and old. Gallerists are, by structure of their work, attunded to centreing visitors. Their role involves championing artists while cultivating relationships with their audiences, a dynamic that naturally lends itself to centredness founded in dialogue and long-term engagement.
Centred on Whose Terms?
Although visitor-centredness aligns with broader cultural values of democratisation, in practice it risks being more rhetoric than truly transformative. Across different contexts, the role of the visitors remains carefully shaped through institutional intentions. This complexity becomes clearer when considering My City is Yours and Long Dawn, two exhibitions that while operating in different cultural domains, engaged with ideas of visitor-centredness in distinct and revealing ways. Both exhibitions offer the visitor a central role, the former through affective-immersive experience and the latter through slower forms of engagement grounded in knowledge sharing. Yet, both are subtly reinforced by the institutional logics from which they emerge, questioning whether visitor-centredness is as open or unmediated as it first appears.
In My City is Yours, visitors are invited to navigate the exhibition like a city, free to wander and explore. On entry, they are handed a fold-out map, complete with destinations and stamp points. The act of collecting stamps suggests autonomy and play. What appears like free movement becomes a gamified prompt that creates a subtle pressure to complete the experience in a specific way. The visitor's spontaneous exploration begins to resemble a curated journey, raising questions about the nature of agency in visitor-centred exhibitions. Just because visitors are engaged does not necessarily mean they hold authorship. These experiences can pacify with feel-good aesthetics, reducing the visitor to a supporting role in spectacle. Cultural institutions carry a responsibility to do more than please, they must create space for genuine dialogue and critical understanding.
It is easy for participation to become performance, particularly in an increasingly competitive and underfunded sector. Public institutions face mounting pressures to justify their existence through measurable impact. At AGNSW, the pressure is clear in its $344 million expansion of the Sydney Modern which, despite doubling the gallery’s footprint, relied on $65 million in taxpayer funding to avoid a projected $30 million loss. Immersive, emotionally resonant exhibitions have become a strategic response to deliver experience that perform well. They are visually compelling, easily marketable and align with the rhythms of cultural tourism and social media. Within this context, visitor-centredness begins to resemble less a radical rethinking of institutional practice, and more of a strategic trade-off to sustain relevancy.
This similar tension appears in Long Dawn, although through a different register. The exhibition creates an atmosphere of openness and contemplation, yet this is not entirely neutral. The absence of benches, wall texts and explicit cues does not inherently offer freedom to explore, rather it presumes the viewer is already flutent in the language of contemporary art and the unspoken codes of the white cube. This a form of quiet exclusivity, reinforced by the very architecture of commercial galleries. This reminds us that the white cube does not inherently hold space, it disciplines it. While the space is intended to honour visitor autonomy, it sets limits on who engagement is truly accessible to. This tension is emphasised in how access to deeper engagement, such as in-gallery talks and art fairs, are inherently mediated. While these initiatives create opportunities for new audiences to connect, they often circulate within exclusive networks.
Where public museums are expected to compete for relevance, commercial galleries face a different but equally pressing imperative. They assert their relevance through prestige and alignment with market interests. At their core, they are businesses and survival depends on vaulting collections and building networks of influence. If anything, the visitor’s presence is reinforced not just as an engaged viewer, but as someone whose participation now actively reinforces the institution’s cultural and market value. Nevertheless, institutions can hold multiple, even contradictory aims at once. Rather than being defined as either/or imperatives, they navigate these tensions simultaneously. For instance, AGNSW’s blockbuster programming uses emotional resonance to deepen public engagement, yet these same strategies are leveraged to serve institutional gain, such as meeting imperatives for financial return and relevance. What matters is that visitor-centred strategies are not reduced to a tool for institutional control, but remain grounded in shared meaning-making and critical public exchange.
Taken together, My City is Yours and Long Dawn highlight how visitor-centredness is not a singular, universally democratic practice, but a dynamic relationship continually shaped by institutional contexts and an evolving public sphere. Recognising the complexity of visitor-centredness lets us improve how we approach it. This means going beyond surface-level gestures of inclusion and embedding visitors into the curatorial process itself, not as just audiences to be addressed, but collaborators and co-author who help shape cultural meaning. For museums, this might involve creating platforms of shared authorship and sustained community dialogue, rather than relying on immersive spectacle as a catch-all strategy. For commercial galleries, it may mean rethinking the spatial and social codes that gatekeep access, finding new ways to invite unfamiliar publics into conversation with contemporary art. Ultimately, visitor-centredness must be understood as a practice that is always negotiated. Asking who is engaged and on what terms is not a critique to undermine progress, but a question that can help institutions become more reflective and equitable in how they engage visitors in the future.
Jessica Tok