Where Is The Brainbody In The Stories of Curation?

Exhibitions about brain science are not transparent environments. They are rather dissemination practices where cultural assumptions and social relations are enacted through the brainbody as a site of and for meaning-making activity. The brainbody is a term used in feminist and critical theory to consider how neurological bodies are entangled with social, political and cultural structures. As a critical tool for thinking about the situatedness of cognition and embodiments of the brain, this paper explores how the brainbody takes shape through differing mechanisms of curation, display and visitor engagement. It does this through a critically discursive analysis of three specific examples of exhibition curation: Brain: The World Inside Your Head (2001), States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness (2015-2016) and Brain Diaries: Modern Neuroscience in Action (2017).