Exhibiting the Interior

PhD applications are invited from candidates from across an interdisciplinary field of art, design, curation, architecture, museums, theatre and related spatial practice to investigate the transitions, transformations and tensions in exhibiting interiors in the contemporary museum. Applications which seek to research the interior as a cultural, historical, and aesthetic artefact and who are interested in navigating the inherent contradictions in displaying previously occupied interiors in public museum contexts are welcome.

This research will examine the programmatic, functional, and aesthetic shifts interiors take when they are deemed culturally, historically and/or aesthetically significant, uprooted from their original site contexts, and required to undergo rigorous curatorial transformation and preservation as a new interior exhibit in the contemporary museum.

This offers opportunities for new research knowledge across museums, interiors and exhibition fields and suggests a recalibration of the interior as a key player in this interrelationship as it undergoes a transition from fixed place to new public spectacle. This requires a process of dislocation, documentation, editing, and eventual aesthetic resurrection and with this inevitable tensions emerge between the original functionality and new fabrication, of authenticity and artifice, of wholeness recreated only partially for effect that evokes some of the theatricality and staginess of the diorama and the stage-set.

This PhD offers exciting opportunities for a critical reassessment of the interior as exhibit as contributing to an expanding interior typology and an opportunity to frame the interior as an expanded, critical practice. This raises questions of the museum visitor’s presence and original interior occupants’ absence, of a strictly choreographed public inhabiting or distanced exhibition experience, of conflicting spatial programmes and competing narratives of host museum and displayed interior.

As such, the interior as exhibit restored and resurrected in the museum adopts some of the characteristics of the object - curated and catalogued amongst a sea of other ‘objects’ yet capable of taking on a new spatial significance and cultural intensity as a site of intellectual reflection, curatorial control, and exposure. Conserving, restoring, and preserving such interiors encourages the speculative and casual occupation of the individual voyeur, of a controlled public trespassing, of hypothesising and collective remembering suggesting a new interiorised gaze (beyond that exposed by contemporary media) but recalling the male gaze to female muse relationship in art which, with domestic interiors as exhibits specifically, invites deeper enquiry of the gendered interior condition. Scope exists for the PhD student to work with theatre set specialists, V&A Dundee and established interior researchers.

Diversity statement

Our research community thrives on the diversity of students and staff which helps to make the University of Dundee a UK university of choice for postgraduate research. We welcome applications from all talented individuals and are committed to widening access to those who have the ability and potential to benefit from higher education.