Exhibition may be framed through many different figures: the exhibition as visibility machine; the exhibition as public sphere; the exhibition as medium; the exhibition as staging site; the exhibition as institutional utterance; the exhibition as spatial choreography; the exhibition as apparatus or dispositif; the exhibition as a rhetorical operation addressing people and/or modelling the world; the exhibition as theatre of power: and the exhibition as assemblage or social operator. This research explores the question of exhibition with particular focus on the exhibition as an object of study; as a site, agent and mode of enquiry in its own right; and as a space of the political imaginary.