'Exploring the Intersection of Art, Knowledge, and Exhibition. Interview with Wesley Meuris'

How do exhibitions shape the way we see, understand, and trust knowledge?

In this interview, Belgian artist and SLARG researcher Wesley Meuris discusses the relationship between art, exhibition design, and the production of knowledge. His artistic practice often takes the form of fictional institutions, museum displays, architectural models, and speculative systems of classification. By creating these imagined structures, Meuris draws attention to the often invisible ways in which knowledge is organised, presented, and given authority.

The conversation focuses in particular on the role of exhibition spaces. From museum architecture to zoological displays, Meuris explores how spatial design, scenography, and systems of display guide our attention and influence the position from which we observe. Rather than treating the exhibition as a neutral setting for objects and information, his work reveals it as an active framework that shapes what can be seen, understood, and believed.

The interview forms part of Performing Science, Mediating Knowledge: Science, Showmanship, and the Performance of Authority in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Nele Wynants and Eva Andersen and published by Brepols. The volume examines how scientific knowledge was staged and communicated through lectures, exhibitions, fairs, theatre, visual media, and other forms of public performance.

Meuris’s contribution brings a contemporary artistic perspective to these questions, highlighting the performative dimensions of exhibitions and the ways in which authority, meaning, and perception are constructed through the spaces in which knowledge is presented.