| dc.description.abstract | Environmental challenges with its social and political impact and relevance have increasingly manifested itself in the cultural sphere, including in museums and the study of them. This thesis explores how an art museum presents environmental issues through a contemporary art exhibition. In museological literature focused on issues such as climate change, engaging with art is pointed out to have unexplored potential. However, art museums have their own characteristics rooted in ideals, traditions, and ambitions that affect how they approach presentation of environmental topics. Thus, in my research I have aimed to investigate the possibilities and challenges caused by such characteristics when engaging with environmental issues in an exhibition of contemporary art, as well as how ideas of the communicative capacities of contemporary artworks affect how the topic is presented. These aspects are inspected through an exhibition analysis of the exhibition Tomorrow is the Question shown at ARoS - Aarhus Art Museum, including an interview with a representative from the curatorial team. I have used the concepts of the discursive and the immersive, including notions of atmospheres, to study the exhibition. Further, characteristics of the art museum, presented in a dilemma between social engagement and aesthetic contemplation, are applied to discuss the analytical findings. While this thesis is a museological study, as the art played such a central role for the museum’s presentation of the subject it addressed, I have included some theoretical approaches to analyze a selection of the artworks in environmental perspectives. Based upon the analysis and the discussions of key findings, I suggest that the artworks are proposed to be the main components to communicate about the exhibition theme, and that the other exhibition elements were to facilitate for this. Further, I argue that the use of discursive and immersive approaches to exhibition making show parallels to the dilemma of social engagement and aesthetic contemplation, making it challenging for art museums to provide necessary contextualization of the artworks inside the exhibition, and leads to an aim to add this by the use of textual elements outside the exhibition space. | eng |