The Abstract exhibition: images BirdMathew BawdenGene 2016 The Abstract is both an exhibition and a reading room for academic journals. As an exhibition it exposes the intersection of traditional and non-traditional realms of creative research and explores the possibilities inherent in collaboration, experimentation and blended disciplinary practice. The space bleeds the intimate with the public, the historical with the contemporary and the ordered with the random. As a reading room it draws on the interior idioms of public libraries to reinvent an environment for solitary and collective literary engagement. The creative interplay between interior architecture and typography builds a new spatial language that extends an awareness of the sources of research and avenues to publish it. It is an ambitious space, intent on exciting the publishing ambitions of MADA’s research community.