The role of scenography in museum exhibitions: The case of the Grossraum at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, Oslo

This thesis investigates the role of scenography in museum exhibitions, and in particular the impact of scenography on exhibition narratives. Texts, objects and images all contribute toward putting forward the exhibition narrative. The main question I engage with is how does scenography relate to these elements in the storytelling process? The aim of the thesis is to show how an analytical focus on scenography can generate insights relevant for both the methodology of museum research and museum theory. Moreover it tries to shed light on how museum curators work with space in the setting up of exhibitions, and how the visitor encounters exhibitions in ways that are not only based on the text and object narratives, but also through the perception of space. This research has thus tried to place emphasis on how the scenographic spatial arrangements shape visitors’ access to the material in exhibitions through their experience of that space. My research object with regard to this analysis is the Grossraum exhibition at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo