Welcome
Welcome to our exhibition, Objects - an exploration of power in society. We are glad to have you here, and hope you will find it an interesting, eye-opening experience. There is no right or wrong way to look at this exhibition, we want you to engage with it in whatever way it stimulates your mind. Follow on, and let us know what you think!
Objects on their own are just physical entities.
It is through the applied human context that object take on meaning - this meaning depends on a myriad factors, ranging from cultural context to sentimentality or just a feeling that an individual has towards the object. It is we who give it a role, a sense of being and given function in the world.
Following on from this, our exhibition explores the relationships between objects and the power that is associated with them - or lack thereof.
Objects of Power
Under the umbrella of power, we count social structures, hierarchies, engrained conventions of how we interact with each other, on an immediate as well as a global level. Looking right around you, social influence is extremely powerful. It shapes how we interact with people on a day to day basis, whether we respect someone, fear them or hate them. Power influences our feelings towards and individual - or sometimes an entire group of people.
But more than just questioning how power structures affect you, our exhibition aims to make you consider how you fit into the picture - because the nature of power is that it is an interaction. If it affects you, then you are also complicit.
Objects are an effective starting point to an exploration of power, because they have a history, a story behind them, thus they are a tangible, visible evidence of the abstract, invisible structures of society that surround us. The objects in our exhibition explore different structures of power: colonialism, organised religion, class, race, the power of man over nature. Ultimately, we want our audience to ask: why is this object here?
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Objects - An exploration of Power in Society by Group 2 OL2016 is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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