Adrian Shaw
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Adrian Shaw's MPhil/PhD Art research project
The Art Museum’s Awakening Surface: Becoming Superficial - How can a poetics of the surface - attuned to rhythm, gesture, and ephemeral activation - transform the art museum from a static container into a dynamic, immanent institutional field?
My research rethinks museum practice by repositioning the museum floor as an active, conceptual, and methodological site - rather than a neutral or overlooked ground. I begin from the belief that museums are not passive repositories for objects, but civic and performative environments where knowledge is co-created, contested, and shared.
Drawing on years of multidisciplinary programming and community-centred work, I approach the museum as a place of experimentation, critical pedagogy, and cultural participation. Through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the refrain, I explore the museum not as a static container, but as a dynamic surface shaped by rhythms, gestures, and acts of public encounter.
The Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain serve as the primary site for this inquiry - a laboratory, archive, and testing ground for rethinking what museums do and what they might become. Here, the floor becomes a key conceptual tool. Treated as a Möbius-like surface, it collapses divisions between inside and outside, institutional and civic, and invites new forms of spatial and social imagination.
The project also examines artists who have used the floor as an active site. Bruce McLean’s King for a Day (1972), which placed 1,000 sealed pamphlets directly onto the Duveen floor, becomes a case study in surface-based institutional critique - an act that temporarily reconfigured the monumental verticality of the space through a grounded, horizontal intervention.
My practice-led research develops a series of small-scale experiments, conversations, community collaborations, and an immersive performance work. These activations test the floor as a methodological instrument: a site of activation, a rhythmic surface, and a way of rethinking institutional practice from the ground up. Each activation will be documented and accompanied by reflective writing, forming a dialogue between theory, practice, and institutional criticality.
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