Exhibiting coins as economic artefacts: Curating historical interpretation in Faith and Fortune: visualizing the divine on Byzantine and early Islamic coinage (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, November 2013-January 2015)

Exhibiting coins as economic artefacts: Curating historical interpretation in Faith and Fortune: visualizing the divine on Byzantine and early Islamic coinage (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, November 2013-January 2015)

Blog Article

Faith and Fortune: visualizing the divine on Byzantine and early Islamic coins was an exhibition at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts (October 2013-January 2015).It reflected on ways in which the rise of Islam in the seventh century shaped global political and economic systems, and how the early Islamic government and the Christian Byzantine Empire expressed the religious loyalties of their states visually.The exhibition, however, attempted to move Bowl (Set of 3) away from traditional approaches to presenting coins, focusing almost exclusively on them as images and political documents.

Instead, this exhibition sought to convey a sense of coins as economic artefacts, tightly woven into the day-to-day fabric of ordinary lives, in a period of extraordinary change.This article examines how the spatial, textual and temporal intersected in Dryer Door historical theory and exhibition design and suggests that exhibition represents an alternative method both of presenting (and teaching) but also of undertaking research.