Mediating Exhibitions via Audience Participation on Social Media: Collectivist Curatorial Approach in One World Exposition 2.1 Exhibition

The integration of social media into daily life is one of the most distinct demographic features of younger generations, especially among Generation Z (born between 1996 and 2015). For museums and other cultural institutions to engage with this audience group efficiently, their exhibitions have to take social media into the consideration of mediating strategies. This paper aims to address the challenges and opportunities of such practice, by analysing and assessing the effectiveness of Collectivist Curatorial Approach to mediate exhibition context via audience participation on social media. Purposefully curated in different curatorial approaches for comparison, two major media art exhibitions in the series One World Exposition 2 were curated in Hong Kong in 2017 and 2018. While the second exhibition One World Exposition 2.2: #YOU #ME #ourSELFIES (2018) will be analysed and compared at a later stage in a separate paper, the first exhibition One World Exposition 2.1: #like4like (2017) is analysed and assessed in this paper, using the Engagement Process identified by E. A. Edmonds, L. Muller and M. Connell with stages including Attractor, Sustainer and Relator. Through observation, focus group and data extracted on social media, the effort of the Collectivist curatorial strategies to intentionally manipulate audience behaviour showed generally successful result in activating audience participation on social media. While recognising its limitations including the institution’s position and motivation towards social media, this paper raises critical implications of social media and exhibitions, such as the influence of social media celebrities, social media posts as audience’s interpretations and the concern of curatorial strategies overshadowing the artworks.