Designing Difficult Exhibitions: Strategic Design for Representing Testimonies of Tauma

By their very nature, ‘difficult’ exhibitions walk a tightrope of power and trauma to become a performance of ideology in the world – that is, the signs and symbols used by a group with shared ideology to communicate it to the world. In difficult exhibitions, that refers to all semiotic resources that visitors use to make meaning: text, images, color, space, light, sound, and so forth (van Leeuwen 2005, Wahlin 2019). With a focus on topics such as genocide, gender violence, contested histories, war, or death, they ask visitors to engage with the trauma of others, inviting them to reflect, learn, and – ultimately – advocate for the type of change‑making the exhibit is calling for. Designers become ‘double‑ended’ interpreters of living history, testimonies of trauma, and stakeholder interests: on the one hand, they interpret the information that comes to them from a range of semiotic resources, while on the other, the very practice of design is a form of interpreting complex narratives for visitors to engage with. With this complexity in mind, design strategy is foundational to an exhibition’s representation of people’s trauma, and it needs to be approached deliberately, empathetically, and with reflexivity. This paper explains how this was incorporated in the design of “Ferguson Voices: Disrupting the Frame” (Kahn, Pruce and Wahlin 2017). It begins by defining what difficult exhibitions are and why they are unique, before revealing some of the vital, yet often unseen, strategic design processes that underpin the final visual approach. I conclude by making some recommendations for curators and designers who work in this space.