Mary Ann Staniszewski –
The Power of Display

Institutional frameworks, of course, always shape the meaning of exhibitions. If this institutional armature is not addressed or countered in some way within the installation design, the exhibition becomes merely an element within the constitution of its larger program. The dynamic is enhanced with an exhibition whose subject is abstracted, and this was certainly the case with the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion; though Mies [van der Rohe] considered it „a room without any specific purpose“, it was undeniably a symbol of modern Germany. The problematic relationship between self-referencial exhibition design and meaning was even more evident in the 1934 Nazi propaganda exhibition Deutsches Volk / deutsche Arbeit […], which promoted National Socialist doctrines of race and labor.