Exhibition, Design, Participation: An Exhibit 1957 and Related Shows

This seventh volume in Afterall’s Exhibitions Histories series focuses on the radical project ‘an Exhibit’ (at the ICA, London in 1957), which emerged from a decade of testing the formats and possibilities of exhibition-making.

A collaboration between two artists, Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore, and a critic and curator, Lawrence Alloway, the show was simultaneously an investigation into abstract environmental forms and a participatory experiment that would fundamentally transform the role of the viewer.