The exhibition is the second event of the museum's program which focuses on monothematic projects shared with Milano Arte Pubblica and Milano Città Mondo and was preceded in October 2023 by the site-specific installation “Light behind unfinished tracks” by Mariana Castillo Deball ( 1975) in the museum agora.

“Exposure”, curated by Katya Inozemtseva and Sara Rizzo, reflects on the traditional concept of the showcase and its centrality in exhibition projects. Linked to the classic museum display, the showcase displays and at the same time separates the object, offering it for use but forming a barrier for the viewer. In ethnographic museums, in particular, the "neutralizing" effect of the display case affects the objects by isolating them, depriving them of their original context and function.

The exhibition is preceded in the rooms of the Permanent Collection by a special intervention by the contemporary artist Theo Eshetu (1958), “Crocodile on a Ceiling”: an unpublished work, produced for MUDEC. Through the reversal of vision, the artist reflects on the origin of the museum itself, to be traced back to the Renaissance Wunderkammern . “Brave New World”, also by Eshetu, is instead a kaleidoscope of moving images that makes the audience itself part of the work.

This is followed in the Focus rooms by a section dedicated to the history of the display case in museum displays and its role as a means of classification, in particular in ethnographic collections, a theme represented in the emblematic work by Candida Höfer (1944), “Ethnologisches Museum Berlin III 2003”.

The theme of desire in the world of commerce is instead addressed through the dreamlike images of the shop windows created by the legendary designer Gene Moore for Tiffany & Co., and those of the displays of "la Rinascente" in the second half of the twentieth century, curated by designers such as Albe Steiner, Giancarlo Iliprandi and Roberto Sambonet.