What does an Exhibition Ask of Us?
Discomfort, Knowledge, and Curatorial Responsibility
Author: Dawit Algerson
What happens when an exhibition asks us to engage with something uncomfortable? What responsibilities belong to the artist who makes the work, the institution that presents it, and the audience encountering it? These responsibilities meet within the exhibition, but they do not necessarily align.
These questions began taking shape while I was co-curating FEBRUARIE 2022: ECOURI, an exhibition of Valeria Duca’s work at the National Museum of Fine Arts of Moldova in 2025,alongside Alexandra Mihalaș. They returned during our symposium in Oslo earlier this year,following a presentation on curating the uncomfortable. I began reconsidering what we ask of audiences when we invite them to engage with difficult realities and what we assume those encounters can accomplish.
Museums and art spaces participate in producing knowledge. Through selection, interpretation, and display, they shape which experiences enter public discussion, whose accounts become authoritative, and what remains difficult to see. War, displacement, poverty, and violence belong to the world these institutions describe. Should information about them be excluded because it causes discomfort? Whose understanding would that protect, and whose reality might it obscure?
Yet choosing to address a difficult subject is different from choosing how to present it. An institution might decline to show a graphic image or construct an immersive simulation while communicating the history through other means. Withholding a particular representation does not necessarily mean withholding knowledge. Equally, a restrained presentation may leave something essential unexpressed.
Discomfort also has different sources. It can arise from confronting suffering, having an assumption challenged, or feeling that a representation humiliates or misrecognises someone. These experiences cannot be evaluated as though they were identical. Examining them requires attention to the relationships between artistic choices, institutional framing, and audience response.
Crossroads Foundation’s A Day in the Life of a Refugee, presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, makes these relationships unusually visible. Although an immersive humanitarian simulation rather than a museum exhibition, it offers a useful comparison. The organisers describe a programme involving displacement, insecurity, constrained choices, and a makeshift camp, developed with refugees, internally displaced people, and humanitarian workers. Their account of the 2019 programme describes a 75-minute experience, with discussion and opportunities for further engagement forming part of the approach. They acknowledge that its composite narrative cannot represent every refugee’s life.
For participants accustomed to exercising authority, simulated powerlessness might interrupt familiar habits of thought. Information previously encountered at a distance might acquire urgency. Those helping to develop the programme may see this confrontation as a way to reach people whose decisions affect displaced populations. Rejecting their chosen method solely because it is uncomfortable could itself require justification.
Nevertheless, participants know that the exercise will end. Their return to ordinary life is anticipated, while the uncertainty of displacement cannot be contained within a scheduled encounter. This difference does not make simulation inherently worthless; every representation is partial. It does make the claims attached to the experience important.
Does the programme help participants recognise how much they still need to understand? Or might its intensity encourage confidence that they now know what displacement feels like? A strong emotional response could accompany either outcome. The discussion afterwards therefore deserves as much attention as the simulation: how does it connect temporary sensations with the histories, policies, and individual circumstances those sensations cannot explain?
A different dimension emerges in Political Art, shown at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw in 2021–2022. The exhibition presented artistic freedom and political dissent as central concerns. In an accompanying essay, co-curator Jon Eirik Lundberg interprets Dan Park’s provocative collages as warnings against racism, totalitarianism, and political failures. This is an argument about how the works should be understood, and it forms part of the institution’s framing of them.Unwanted Warnings: On the Scandinavian Reception of Dan Park’s Collages
The case raises questions about artistic responsibility without assuming that an artist must avoid offence. How much weight should intention carry when a work permits conflicting interpretations? What responsibility accompanies the use of imagery that some viewers may experience as degrading? An artist cannot determine every response, but the unpredictability of reception does not make the choice of imagery irrelevant.
Institutional responsibility enters through the decision to exhibit and explain that work. Presenting an artist as a dissenter may open space for arguments excluded elsewhere. It may also predispose audiences to regard objections as evidence of intolerance. What would allow visitors to examine the work, question its defence, and challenge the institution’s interpretation?
Artistic freedom makes room for difficult expression. How an institution exercises its own judgement in selecting and presenting that expression remains a separate question. Does it provide the conditions for disagreement, including disagreement with its curatorial premise? How does it distinguish an invitation to engage from an expectation that audiences accept its preferred reading?
The Davos simulation and Political Art involve different purposes and methods. They nevertheless reveal how makers and institutions construct a role for their audiences. Visitors may be invited to empathise, question themselves, reconsider a judgement, or confront an unfamiliar position. What happens when they respond differently? Can refusal, criticism, or departure also count as considered engagement?
These questions have a historical dimension. In late Victorian London, the practice of “slumming” brought relatively affluent visitors into impoverished neighbourhoods, particularly the East End. Curiosity and excitement existed alongside philanthropy, investigation, and reform. Concern for others and unequal relations of power could coexist within the same visit. Slums and Slumming in Late-Victorian London
A contemporary simulation is not equivalent to such an excursion. Yet the visitor’s freedom to enter and leave remains worth examining. One person’s enduring circumstances become another person’s temporary encounter.
The accusation of “poverty porn” draws attention to the possibility that deprivation becomes material for someone else’s emotional consumption. Used too quickly, however, the term can become a verdict before the relationship has been examined. Who initiated the representation? Who controls its form? What can contributors challenge or refuse? Who benefits from its circulation?
A distressing representation might reduce someone to an image of need. It might also be a means through which that person deliberately demands attention. Ethical scrutiny must account for that agency. It must also remember people who are represented without being present to explain, contest, or influence what an exhibition makes of their lives.
These questions return me to ECOURI. Alongside Duca’s paintings, we included audio testimonies from Ukrainian refugees. Our intention was to allow visitors to encounter individual accounts of displacement through people’s own voices. The paintings and testimonies offered different ways into the subject, and I observed strong emotional responses among visitors.
What those responses demonstrated is less certain. They indicated that the encounter mattered emotionally to some people. They did not, by themselves, establish what visitors understood, whether their assumptions changed, or how long their attention lasted.
Words such as empathy, awareness, and impact can become too readily attached to visible emotion. Tears or silence might express recognition, grief, discomfort, or a response that remains difficult to articulate. Our intentions and observations need to remain distinguishable.
Including testimony also created responsibilities that could not be fulfilled simply by making voices audible. Selection, editing, placement, and presentation remained curatorial decisions.Contributors’ words entered a structure that we helped determine. An account heard beside a painting might be interpreted through that image; an excerpt might acquire an emphasis different from the longer account from which it came.
Looking back, I need to ask what possibilities the format gave contributors to shape that relationship. How much authority did their presence carry? Could visitors distinguish an individual account from a general statement about displacement? These questions place my practice within the ethical problem I am examining.
They also complicate the idea of audience care. A Ukrainian visitor, someone with another history of displacement, and someone approaching the subject from a distance might relate differently to the same material. None of these positions produces one predictable response. Recognition may be welcome or painful. Unfamiliarity may invite attention or resistance.
Care involves decisions about preparation, context, and choice. Allowing visitors to decide whether to encounter particular material can preserve access while recognising different needs. Removing material on their behalf, however, may prevent an encounter that contributors actively want to make possible.
Audience responsibility deserves consideration within these conditions. What might it mean to approach a work attentively, examine context, or acknowledge the limits of one’s interpretation? Such expectations cannot reasonably require endurance, agreement, or a prescribed emotional response. An institution asking visitors to remain open must also consider how it will respond when their engagement takes the form of criticism.
Funding shapes these relationships too. The European Commission has documented support for cultural projects concerned with refugee integration through Creative Europe. This establishes the existence of thematic support; it does not establish that exhibitions about traumatic subjects are generally easier to fund.
It does invite questions about how funding frameworks influence a project’s language and scope. Do they enable work that would otherwise remain unsupported? Do they encourage institutions to promise empathy or social change before anyone can know what an exhibition will produce? Supporting displaced practitioners and supporting representations of displacement are different activities. What opportunities exist for those practitioners to explore subjects unrelated to adversity?
Artists, institutions, and audiences therefore participate in a relationship where responsibility is shared but power is uneven. Institutions control access, resources, and framing. Artists make choices whose effects extend beyond intention. Audiences interpret, question, and sometimes refuse. The people represented may have influence within these processes, or may remain outside them.
An appeal to artistic freedom, educational purpose, or audience openness can clarify a responsibility. It can also become a way of passing responsibility elsewhere. How might we recognise the difference in a particular exhibition?
I remain reluctant to make discomfort a sufficient reason for excluding knowledge. I am equally reluctant to treat discomfort as evidence that knowledge has been produced. What an exhibition asks of us should remain open to examination including what it asks of those whose lives, identities, or experiences make the encounter possible.
When we leave an exhibition challenged or moved, what have we learned and whose account would help us recognise what we still do not understand?
All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
