Comunication with Islamic Material Culture: A Case Study of the Room 34 in the British Museum

Communication inside the museum comprises three active agents: curator, visitor, and material culture. The process of making meaning results from the interaction between these agents. Each one of them is independent and measuring the success of any exhibit depends on the degree of their engagement. Therefore, three meanings come up here, an organisational meaning, an interactional meaning, and a representational meaning. Each one of these meanings is tied to one agent, the organisational with the physicality of the exhibition, the interactional with the visitors, and the representational with the curators. The result of this triangular interaction is the communication or making meaning. This perspective is adopted by the New museology trend, which one of its branches is Museum as a text or reading the museum as a readable text. This new approach will be adopted to examine the Islamic Gallery in the British Museum (Room 34). It uses New-museological lenses and read this gallery attempting to understand the communications between its three agents. Although it looks an Old-museological gallery, its potentiality of a better communicating with its audience is high. Pioneering the museum studies, this study will uncover this potentiality and specify the gaps of making meaning in John Addis Gallery to bring, for the first time, as one of the most important examples of examining the readability of a museum internationally that exhibits Muslim material culture