Exhibitions of Mourning: published text addressing the relationship between spectatorship and mourning

This chapter continues Dibosa’s enquiry regarding the emergence of spectorship in a problematized context, addresses the relationship between spectatorship and mourning, and investigates whether commemoration can be theorized as collective memorialisation involving the production of another kind of witnessing – the witness who produces marks of grief. The research also questions if the viewer, when a subject of mourning, overflows into the strictures laid down by the architecture of the exhibition, and how the idea of the resistance of the spectator is addressed, and the extent of language as a curatorial device.

Working in the field of spectatorship within the broader discipline of museology and the sub-discipline of contemporary curatorial studies, this text focused on the use of a comments book in a posthumous retrospective exhibition and explored the way in which spectators used the comments book as a means of staging themselves as both mourners and viewers of the artwork. Generating and collating data surrounding the posthumous retrospective of photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Dibosa’s research concerns an event of historical significance within the development of post-war black British visual arts and identifies all living curators of the posthumous retrospective, using semi-structured interviews to generate additional data concerning the event and develop a new understanding of the way in which spectators make use of materials provided by exhibitions as a means of developing strategies to transform posthumous retrospectives into scenes of mourning.