ABSTRACT The history of art museums is commonly considered to be a history of collections intertwining institutional history and the biographies of diverse museum actors. In China, museums of art and history followed a historical trajectory from the former Soviet model to the current one dedicated to ancient art and cultural relics. This art museum model, in practice, adopts several derivatives, varying between the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, art history, and history. Rather than foregrounding the historical-archaeological significance of artefacts or reinforcing state-centric nationalist narratives, this article presents a comprehensive perspective that elucidates the evolving exhibitionary culture in China’s official museums since the end of 1980s, and illustrates how museum narratives are generally devoted to the renewing of traditional local culture in a global-local dialectic. The work, of a qualitative nature, examines the Suzhou Museum (Suzhou), one of the most iconic Chinese museums of art and history where the traditional and the cosmopolitan coexist, as an empirical case study. The article argues that the transforming museum narratives of the Suzhou Museum over time carries trifold connotations: abstract aesthetics remain important through ideological shifts; shifts in political power are embodied in the exhibitionary complex; and visitors form a continuous point of engagement.

ABSTRACT How do contingencies between a museum’s historical legacies and its present-day organisational identity impact the museum’s conduct, values, and core narratives? What may be the tensions between historical legacies and present-day conditions in the twenty-first century? And why are some historical trajectories maintained by the institution, even when they collide with present-day paradigms within or beyond the museum? The paper explores these questions through its case study, the New Carlsberg Glyptotek, a collector’s museum founded in 1897. Tracing the museum’s core narratives and present-day organisational identity back to the founder’s trajectories, the paper documents how past sets of values may come to be regarded as given premises of the museum and its modalities of practice. The paper integrates critical museology with conceptual tools from organisational theory, psychology, and sociology. This eclectic analytical lens exposes not only the problems but also the benefits connected to the museum’s historical core narratives.

ABSTRACT This paper uses Gorichanaz and Latham’s document phenomenology as a method for understanding early museum documentation, specifically, the collection or museum lists of William Knight of the Marischal College and University of Aberdeen. It seeks to provide an examination of the historical context of the production of these documents, the temporal and social contexts of their interpretation in the contemporary period as archival sources, and to develop scholarly interpretation and discourse regarding museum documentation history, theory and practice. In the museological literature, documents are typically relegated to being containers of data for objects, but this paper demonstrates that documents are instead an exemplary case of what Bennett terms ‘vibrant matter’; they are temporal, contingent, febrile, and evocative.

ABSTRACT This article’s aim is to analyse why Poland’s socialist authorities decided to transform Wawel Castle into a historic house museum and how they took advantage of its new role in order to bolster their political legitimacy during their rule’s initial period. My argument is that Wawel Castle’s transformation into a historic house museum was motivated by the building’s status as the ultimate national symbol and its specific geopolitical situation. Situated in Cracow, far from the capital city, it could have played only a marginal role as an official residence in Poland’s highly centralised political life. Therefore, the socialist state ventured to exploit this heritage’s symbolic potential differently. The establishment of the historic castle museum demonstrated the regime’s attachment to national heritage, serving also to adapt the castle to its socialist vision. The castle’s musealization could legitimize the regime in the eyes of non-socialists without sacrificing its ideological agenda.

ABSTRACT The Bowes Museum, a public art museum constructed for the inhabitants of Barnard Castle, County Durham, which opened in 1892, started life as the private collection of John Bowes (1811–1885) and Joséphine Bowes (1825–1874). The collection’s transfer from the private spaces of their homes to the public space of the museum was marked by an increasing awareness of and adherence to the structures that governed Europe’s first public art institutions, such as the taxonomic division of collections, the employment of professional curators and the use of appropriate display furniture. This article considers the strategies employed by the Boweses as their museum project developed from the 1850s until the 1880s. The domestic furniture, exemplified by new cabinets supplied by the French firm Monbro aîné to suit various domestic decorative schemes, is contrasted with display cases repurposed from those provided by the firm Haret for the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878.

ABSTRACT In 1916 Lord Curzon inherited his ancestral home, Kedleston Hall, and set about planning its renovation. Part of this work was the creation of a new museum in which to display his collection of ‘Eastern’ objects, amassed through his viceregal career and his extensive travels as a young man. The commission of display cases was central to this project. Designed to Curzon’s specifications, drawn from V&A models, cases imported museum modes of display and encounter into Kedleston. This article explores how cases defined sensory encounters with the objects within them and fixed how they would be read. The stabilisation of these objects within cases would in turn stabilise Curzon's legacy by building it into the architecture of Kedleston. The cases structure the objects within them, holding them out of time and space, fixing them into visual symbols and defining how visitors would encounter them.

ABSTRACT In the first half of the twentieth century in UK museums, there was a reaction against glass display cases by some curators, museum founders and visitors. Conventional case displays came to be seen as dull, and metaphors of deadness, dustiness and coldness were used to describe them. By contrast, displays which did not use cases but aimed to reconstruct the past using period rooms, parts of rooms, or entire buildings (all of which might be ‘real’ or replicas) became increasingly popular. Such displays were thought to bring the past to life, to be warm and attractive. The article traces the roots and growth of this phenomenon across a range of UK museums and curators, and argues that it demonstrates changing modes of cultural memory in the twentieth century, as democratic structures developed and entertainment cultures were profoundly influenced by developments such as cinema. For some people, the article shows, caseless museum displays were a source of new mystical and transcendent experiences giving them a much-wanted sense of contact with the past.

ABSTRACT This article reviews the display furniture used to present Iranian playing cards in the British Museum's Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World. It examines the need for alternative approaches to Perso-Islamic material, as distinct from European exhibition methods, while addressing the challenges of engaging with Qajar-era objects that were originally meant to be held and played with but are now confined behind museum cases. The article highlights the materiality of the cards and the design of their display, emphasising the role these sensory dimensions play in audience engagement. A case study of these playing guards, that contrasts the original sensory context of their use with their ensuing display in a museum context, reveals the way museum cases involving a ‘separation of the senses’ that split vision and touch along a series of nested binaries.

ABSTRACT Display cases are central components of museums, yet, these ubiquitous pieces of furniture have thus far largely escaped scholarly scrutiny. This special issue seeks to remedy this, and in doing so provide new contributions to histories of museums, exhibition cultures, collecting, display, and knowledge production. The five articles included begin to trace histories of display cases, from the great exhibitions of the nineteenth century to national institutions today, examining how cases are active agents, crucial to museological processes as vital interlocutors between object and viewer. This article introduces the five articles in this special issue, and what they tell us about display cases within exhibitionary cultures, as evolving technologies, as devices that define objects, and finally, the sensorial boundaries they create. Together they demonstrate how generative examining display cases can be, and provide a foundation for further study of this central component of museums.