Text: Anna Ochmann
In one of her letters, Tsarina Catherine II, describing the works collected in the Winter Pavilion in St. Petersburg (known as the Hermitage), wrote sarcastically: “… and only mice and I see all this!”1 . Two centuries later, I quote this sentence in my thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. The work is entitled Exhibition – between architecture, art and information, and even then, this one seemingly anecdotal sentence raised questions about the meaning of collecting things, about visibility and about who collections are actually dedicated to.
Returning to these words today, I think about the long history of exhibition as a practice balancing between idea and matter, elitism and audience, knowledge and experience. I also think about the contemporary paradigm shift – about accessibility understood not only as the physical “opening of the institution’s doors”, but as the recognition of the multiplicity of ways of perceiving and being in the exhibition space. This text is an attempt to trace this path: from Platonic distrust of things, through the first collections and museums, to today’s questions about inclusivity, also in the context of neuroatypical people.
From idea to thing: the paradox of exhibiting objects
The history of exhibiting, understood as the practice of collecting, organising and displaying objects, is not a linear story leading from the chaotic collection of things to the modern museum. Its beginnings are marked by a deep philosophical tension concerning the meaning of materiality, representation and cognition through things. Already in Platonic thought2 , objects, and even more so works of art, are burdened with the suspicion of ontological secondaryness: things are only imperfect reflections of ideas, and art, by imitating the sensory world, distances itself even further from the truth, squaring this imperfection. In this sense, the practices of collecting and exhibiting objects appear problematic: instead of bringing us closer to the essence of being, they perpetuate an illusion, and this is harmful.
And yet collections already appeared in antiquity, in a culture aware of this philosophical distrust of things. The Greek mouseion, a place dedicated to the muses, was not only a space for contemplation, but also an institution for collecting objects: texts, instruments and artefacts. The Mouseion in Alexandria, together with the Library, combined the ambition to comprehensively embrace knowledge with a material archive of its carriers. Collecting objects was not a denial of the Platonic hierarchy of beings, but an attempt to circumvent it in practice – since ideas are not directly accessible, their traces should be collected.
The twists and turns of history treated the achievements of antiquity barbarically – the Mouseion lay in ruins, its collections plundered. Christian Europe was unable to create similar institutions for quite some time, and in addition, in the Middle Ages, the relationship between thing and meaning underwent another transformation. Cathedrals and church treasuries became places of intense accumulation of objects that functioned not as autonomous aesthetic objects, but as carriers of the sacred. The cathedral functions as a comprehensive proto-exhibition, organising vision and meaning.
The Renaissance brought about a fundamental change in thinking about objects and knowledge. The humanistic rehabilitation of the sensory world and the development of the natural sciences fostered new forms of collecting, in which objects became sources of knowledge. Studios and cabinets of curiosities brought together natural artefacts, works of art and exotic objects.
It was the Renaissance and early modernity that paved the way for the first great public collections, which formed the foundation of the modern museum. The transfer of collections from private to public spaces did not only mean wider access, but also a profound epistemological change: objects ceased to be private trophies of knowledge or power and began to function as elements of a common cognitive order, subject to the rules of selection and display.
The history of exhibition practice thus turns out to be not a history of neutral organisational practices, but a story of changing relationships between idea and thing, seeing and knowing, authority and audience.
When I was writing my thesis, I focused on the tension inherent in the history of exhibition design – from Platonic distrust of objects, through the sacred order of the Middle Ages, to Renaissance attempts to tame matter as a tool of cognition. I analysed the theoretical and practical aspects of exhibition design, its relationship with architecture and information. At the end of the 1990s, however, the category of accessibility did not appear in this thinking. Today, this text is an attempt to add the missing chapter.
Accessibility as a problem: from elitism to multiple ways of experiencing
If the history of exhibition-making is a history of negotiating the relationship between idea and object, then the history of accessibility reveals another, equally fundamental tension: between those who can see, understand and experience, and those who are excluded from this experience. For centuries, collecting and displaying objects was a deeply elitist practice addressed to a narrow circle of insiders, culturally, socially and cognitively prepared for “proper” reception. Accessibility was understood almost exclusively as the physical possibility of entering a given space, which was also often limited due to status, origin or education.
In ancient times and the Middle Ages, access to collections was selective and hierarchical. Mouseions, cathedral treasuries and monastery libraries were not publicly accessible spaces, but places of guarded knowledge. Accessibility was not a problematic category at the time, and exclusion was a natural part of the world order3 . Exhibiting objects served to legitimise power (intellectual, religious or political) rather than to inclusively share experience.
The first significant change in this thinking occurred during the Enlightenment with the emergence of the modern public museum. Opening collections to the “general public” (as in the case of the British Museum or the Louvre) introduced a new idea of accessibility. Every citizen can enter a museum and, importantly, it is assumed by default that everyone is able to see, understand and assimilate knowledge in a similar way. However, this accessibility is only apparent: it is based on a single model of the recipient, i.e. a physically able, neurotypical, educated person who is comfortable with the codes of high culture. Those who deviate from this model remain theoretically “included” but practically invisible.
Thinking about accessibility in the sense we understand it today only began to emerge in the 20th century, with the development of human rights, emancipation movements and criticism of cultural institutions as tools for reproducing inequality. Initially, the discussion mainly concerned physical barriers and focused on architectural accessibility for people with mobility disabilities. Over time, however, this scope broadened significantly: accessibility ceased to be a matter of “amenities” and began to be understood as a fundamental question of who an exhibition is designed for and what ways of experiencing it are considered legitimate.
A particularly significant shift took place at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, with the development of research on disability, neuroatypicality and critical theories challenging the idea of a single, universal audience. In this view, accessibility is no longer just about enabling entry into the exhibition space, but about recognising the multiplicity of perceptions, ways of processing stimuli and relationships with objects. Silence, an excess of visual stimuli, linear narration, the dominance of text, and the prohibition of touch—all these elements, which until now were treated as obvious and, in a sense, neutral, are beginning to be perceived as decisions that exclude certain groups of recipients.
Accessibility is therefore becoming not an addition to exhibition practice, but a critical tool. It forces us to rethink basic assumptions: does an exhibition have to be primarily visual? Does knowledge have to be conveyed in the form of text? Does aesthetic experience require silence and distance?
In this sense, contemporary thinking about accessibility means that exhibiting things is no longer an act directed at an abstract “viewer,” but becomes a process of negotiation between different needs – different bodies, minds and ways of being in the world.
It can therefore be said that accessibility, understood broadly, inclusively and critically, is one of the most important contemporary chapters in the history of exhibition-making. It does not so much expand the audience as change the very concept of reception. In this sense, the question of accessibility is a question about the future of exhibiting: whether cultural institutions are ready to abandon the illusion of a single ideal of perception in favour of a pluralism of experiences which, although different, are equally valid.
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