Richter, D. (2014) ‘Revisiting Display: Display and Backstage’, OnCurating, Issue 22: Politics of Display. Available at: https://www.on-curating.org/issue-22-43/revisiting-display-display-and-backstage.html (Accessed: 30 April 2026).
In Revisiting Display: Display and Backstage, Richter distinguishes between display (the visible surface), and backstage (the concealed elements of the exhibition apparatus that sustain its operation). Richter argued that “the more successful the display, the more invisible its frame” (Richter, 2014). This observation reveals a structural paradox: successful design necessarily erases its own visibility. A well-curated exhibition presents coherent and self-evident, while the apparatus responsible for this coherence, such as editing, sequencing, and decisions regarding omission, remains hidden. The viewer perceives only the display, while the invisible backstage provides the display with its consistency.
This paradox redirected and clarified my attention. Prior to the contextualising phase, my enquiry focused on the image itself: how fold/unfold organises viewing, and how the image remains unstable. Richter prompted me to recognise that the frame is not only internal to the image but is also embedded in the entire apparatus surrounding it. This insight shifted my research target from the image to the curatorial system, which arranges and performs within a temporary space through comparable logics. Consequently, my research question evolved from how the image is read to how the conditions of viewing are organised across multiple dimensions, namely time, space, and bodily interaction. My enquiry refined from the earlier, more abstract question of “how does fold deframe the frame” to the more focused “how does folding shape the way exhibition information is read within a guidebook”.
For graphic communication design, this implies that no layout is neutral: every design decision is simultaneously a concealment decision, determining what is foregrounded, what is footnoted, and what is cropped down (Richter, 2014). Design is not merely the act of presenting; it is the act of organising what is concealed and what is revealed. Similar to Friedberg’s argument of the frame as a construction of invisibility (Friedberg, 2006), Richter extends the logic from the single image to the entire exhibition apparatus. These perspectives collectively establish the position that visibility is constructed rather than inherent.
My understanding of Richter’s framework in early-stage practice was superficial. I used display and backstage as a classification system, dividing the exhibition material I had collected into five separate layers, and treated folding as the act of revealing the backstage from beneath the display. The two positions were explicitly set in opposition by the creases of the fold, and the reading conditions were designed too literally, which removed the reader’s agency in viewing. Through user testing and iterative development, this binary distinction collapsed. I realised that the prototype contained overloaded and distracted information, which overlooked the narrative potential of the act of folding and unfolding itself. The exhibition guidebook, as a material object that embodies both positions (display & backstage) simultaneously, became a productive site for this realisation. It is officially designed (display), and can be held in hand (backstage); each unfolding reveals one position only while stepping back into another.
In the final staged outcome, display and backstage are no longer surface terms used to categorise material. They function as neutral dynamic states, embedded within the structural decisions of the design. And the motifs of the exhibition can not only be treated as content, but also be folded into the folding structure as conceptual elements. The research focus shifted accordingly, from the earlier horizontal accumulation of information across five layers to a vertical interplay of repetition, labelling, and unfolding structure. These three forces together generate a hierarchy that is continuously rewritten by the reader. The sequential reveal of layers, the recurrence of the same elements across different unit positions, and the labelling of frame elements collectively examine how viewing is redistributed and redirected in the final prototype. Each unfolding simultaneously reveals and conceals, and the narrative produced by the fold and the information it reorganises continuously inform one another. Richter provided the way of questioning, and the project responds by breaking free from the binary framework and provides an answer.
Barbican Centre (2025) Encounters: Giacometti × Mona Hatoum [Exhibition]. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 3 September 2025 – 11 January 2026.
Encounters: Giacometti × Mona Hatoum is the second exhibition in the Barbican’s three-part series, presented under the subtitle Divide. Within the gallery space, the works of Giacometti are paired with those of contemporary artist Mona Hatoum, so that the two practices speak to one another across temporal contexts and together respond to shared themes—such as domestic and hostile environments—while examining how space affects viewing and organises narrative (Barbican Centre, 2025). The curatorial logic is one of cross-temporal echo and intertextuality: Hatoum, as one of the curators, uses the exhibition system to respond to, rewrite, and fold herself into Giacometti’s work. Remarkably, the most striking integration is Hatoum’s Cube (2006), which encloses Giacometti’s The Nose (1947)—a historical sculpture is folded into a contemporary one, so that a single object holds both artists at once. Throughout the gallery, the same conceptual register reappears at varying scales, performed within a temporal-spatial vector through the visitor’s movement through the room.
The exhibition’s use of scale-shift, juxtaposition, and motif return resembles closely Tillmans’s spatial multi-vectored hanging method (Halley, 2002), only that the units being arranged are no longer photographs of different sizes but sculptures from different historical contexts. The curator performs fold and unfold at the scale of the room. Visiting the exhibition in person allowed me to gather many personal viewpoints and visual readings of the show, and subsequent research surfaced further material: two-dimensional images and naming distributed through press releases and printed material. The three-dimensional objects already begin to circulate as flat signs within the exhibition itself, while the room and the page operate as one continuous system staging the exhibition together.
In the context of graphic communication design, this approach blurs the boundary between curatorial and design decisions, making their shared logic explicit. Both involve choices regarding hierarchy and sequence, such as determining what is seen first, what is adjacent, what is delayed, and what reappears at a different scale. These processes directly parallel the operations a designer undertakes on a page or throughout a publication. The exhibition also responds to Richter’s analysis of display and backstage in the Politics of Display issue (Richter, 2014). Hatoum’s intervention into The Nose makes Richter’s argument physical—the curatorial frame is no longer hidden behind the artwork but becomes integral to the work itself. The backstage of selection and arrangement appears as display.
This exhibition shaped my project on two specific levels: conceptual and methodological. Initially, I extracted from the exhibition’s official thematic framing and from the subtitle Divide my own simplified working concepts—cage and walk. These motifs recur throughout the exhibition and correspond to my understanding of the curatorial frame: a seemingly free movement within a frame already established. Divide itself also offered a structural model: fold is divide materialised on paper. On the methodological level, the exhibition’s accompanying printed guidebook, designed by Daly & Lyon—a simple vertical m-fold leaflet with a single stapled insert—became a working case study for my enquiry into how a guidebook can act as a dual carrier. With no traditional wall labels in the gallery, this leaflet operates at once as a portable, easily-read invisible navigation tool and as an interpretive document carrying the conceptual logic of the show. The m-fold gives it the lightness of a map, while the stapled insert sets a reading rhythm. This made me realise that a guidebook is not an accessory to an exhibition—it can become the exhibition’s second body, where the operations of fold, juxtaposition, and motif return are restaged in paper form.
This exhibition demonstrated, at the level of curatorial logic, how unfolding can shape the multidimensional possibilities of information performance. It also revealed that a guidebook can function as a dual carrier, structuring the reader’s experience in parallel with the exhibition.
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