The question of exhibition delineates an act of showing. On the surface, the term “exhibition” manifests in itself the very same operation of clear and distinct presentation that it designates. The question of exhibition as a transparent construct appears both in the discourse of the everyday and in specialist jargon of academia and the art field. The question “What is an exhibition?”- seems to offer no real problem. “Exhibition” is simply where things are shown and where people go/come to see those things that are on display.
This issue of PARSE, published in three parts, examines the question of the exhibition. One of the aims of this series-issue is to turn attention to the material, experiential, as well as conceptual and political conditions of the exhibition that may have been overlooked within the growing literature on curatorial and exhibition histories. Our aim, as editors is not to elevate the exhibition form. Rather, we wish to interrogate exhibition as a pervasive category of display and mediation where principles of exposition, demonstration, exemplification, taxonomy, circulation, commentary, spectatorship and valorization are operative. Since the 1990’s curatorial discourse has sought to position the curatorial away from, or at the very least as in excess of, the practical tasks of exhibition-making whilst the burgeoning field of exhibition histories has created a historiographic approach to the forms, developments and questions posed by exhibition. This series of contributions seeks, in some respects to return to the fundamental question of exhibition-to interrogate it as a self-explanatory category. Part 1 published in June 2021 includes contributions from Dave Beech, Kathrin Böhm, Alaina Claire Feldman, Samia Henni, Steven Henry Madoff, Saul Marcadent, Lisa Rosendahl and Jéssica Varrichio; and roundtables with Rasha Salti, Nick Aikens, Kristine Khouri and Anthony Gardner; and with Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Gavin Wade, Mick Wilson and Franciska Zólyom.
Part 2 will be published in late Summer 2021, followed by Part 3 early Autumn 2021.
Parts 2 and 3 will include contributions from Ingrid Cogne, Patrizia Costantin, Kris Dittel & Jelena Novak, Cătălin Gheorghe, Ola Hassanain , Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova & Damon Reaves, Catalina Imizcoz, David Morris, Barbara Neves Alves, Paul O’Neill, Joey Orr, Mateusz Sapija, Vladislav Shapovalov, Sasha Shestakova and Joshua Simon.
Five research frames have guided the selection of contributions. Firstly, as editors we were keen to mine the competing ontological and epistemological conceptions of exhibition as manifest in contemporary exhibition practices, exhibition studies and exhibition histories. Secondly, we have sought to consider the exhibition as research action, research object and research site across the arts and sciences; that offers a distinct form and affordance in both manifesting and furthering an inquiry. Thirdly, we were keen to identify the translations and relays of exhibition within online and algorithmic domains, both before, during and (eventually) after the Covid19 pandemic. Fourthly, the interchanges between exhibition and what has been variously termed socially engaged, socially embedded and expanded practices was of particular interest for us, considering practices that are often, if not typically, constituted and valorized in terms other than that of the exhibition. Lastly, and to some extent framing all of these questions was the manner in which political imaginaries are at work within different constructions and operations of exhibition.
In approaching these five questions many of the contributions draw on specific cases studies of exhibitions, spanning the fields of art, architecture and fashion and drawing from a vast archive of contexts and histories. Running through these contributions is an invitation to question the terms under which we accept “exhibition” as given. Our ambition is not to chart an exhaustive map of exhibition typologies or sketch a history of the manifold ways in which exhibition as form has been deployed. Instead what we hope emerges, is a prompt to reconsider the terms and implications which the exhibition–in its manifold forms-evokes.
In the opening contribution Dave Beech offers a historical contextualization of the exhibition. In seeking to redefine the exhibition Beech asserts for the need “to elevate art as a scholarly activity above both handicraft and industry.” His contribution foregrounds the historical institutional conditions that have created certain forms of exhibition practice but offers a challenge to the way in which technologies of display require broader differentiations between the ubiquity of “shop window displays, media events, public information announcements, pedagogical situations, activist events and other forms of display.”
Samia Henni posits exhibition as a form of writing. Drawing on her long-term research on the architecture of the French war in Algeria, presented in both exhibition form and a book, Henni alludes to the ways in which the exhibition produces forms of writing that are not possible within a publication. “Conversely” she writes, “the form of writing that the various iterations of the exhibition have produced in the exhibition spaces cannot be expressed and transmitted through the writing of this text.” In the case of this issue, gathering largely textual contributions on ‘the question of exhibition’ is perhaps counter intuitive. Writing essays on exhibitions is, as Henni summarises ‘not the exhibition itself’. This statement, like many similar propositions in this issue, is not intended to mark a space of exception for the category of exhibition. Rather, it is to point to how manifesting, processing and rehearsing research material through the configurations of the visual, textual and spatial conditions of an exhibition produces meaning and affect in particular ways.
In the conversation between between Rasha Salti, Nick Aikens, Kristine Khouri and Anthony Gardner two exhibitions—“Past Disquiet” and “NIRIN” are the framework for a series of reflections on exhibition forms, its relation to research and the object of research. This triangulated connection in “Past Disquiet” is explored through an examination of the social history in the Arab world in which readers are invited to consider process as opposed to artworks in an exhibition. By insisting on research as the exhibition form, the curators “try to tell “complete” stories, or at least to have the least amount of gaps possible. In other words, they were compelled by a sense of duty, and they were compulsive by nature.” The conversation style of this contribution enacts the interview methods deployed by the curators in which texts and video materials served to provide a more comprehensive narrative perspective: “the full story.”
Turning to “NIRIN”, the 22nd Biennale in Sydney, art historian Anthony Gardner foregrounds his approach not as “thinking about exhibitions, or with exhibitions but thinking through exhibitions”. In NIRIN, Gardner suggests, artistic director Brook Andrew sought to “strip away the discourse so that the matter just speaks for itself, or speaks in a way that it wants to speak. It is simply the presentation of the thing. It could be something that has a more spiritual resonance, it could be something that has different resonant materialities.” In a critical intervention, the curators reflect on the role of spectators’ imagination to resolve their engagement with the histories presented and the strategic elisions in these exhibitions.
Saul Marcadent uses the case study of the silver anniversary of Self Service, to focus on the relation between editorial practices in the printed magazine and in museum exhibition-making. The description of the exhibition approach, its display strategies and the role of the editor and curator Marcadent invites a reconsideration of the exhibition as an expansion of the fashion magazine form “in which the contributions of photographers, designers and stylists coexisted, in much the same way as they do on the page; were shown ”as exhibition-document that through the selection of a number of fragments reconstructed a history of publishing, thereby underlining the need to preserve its traces.”
Alaina Claire Feldman provides a comprehensive historical overview of practices of exhibiting nature and its role in advancing the disconnect between nature and the construction of self. This particular focus on the history of the aquarium provides an important account of how personal interest-the aquarium as hobby-was inextricably connected to bourgeois life. “Possession of the aquarium and acts of maintaining an entire microcosm reflects greater colonial projects of control, because it allows for the Western bourgeois hobbyist to extract and sustain exotic life.” Her argument develops towards connecting the evolution of the aquarium as a private pursuit to a public presence, inseparable from the history of colonialism.
Jéssica Varrichio narrates her experiences of a site-specific curatorial project museu do louvre pau-brazyl, in São Paulo, Brazil. This descriptive account of the making of the exhibition and the censorship of artwork Black Semiotics by the artist duo Tetine reveals how civil and political structures continue to regulate the representation of certain histories: “Our aim was to recover the traces, to make them visible, to give importance to what has been left behind in the footnotes of history, and to be attentive to what lies underneath supposedly neutral images and discourses. And beneath that siren are the traces of suffocated women.” To want to reveal the names, stories and experiences of women killed under a dictatorship in the artwork resulted in the literal covering of the work with maritime symbols.
Lisa Rosendahl’s contribution to this issue comprises a remarkable reflection on practice in media res, as she considers her curatorial process leading up to the 2021 edition of the Göteborg Biennial of Contemporary Art, titled “The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change” and that in takes as its point of departure the underrepresentation of Sweden’s colonial past and its contemporary consequences. Rosendahl’s approach hovers around the double meaning of thew word plot in English: “Poised in the middle between the idea of a ‘site’ and the idea of a ‘narrative’, a plot is a sequence of events as well as a spatial designation. If a ‘theme’ is an overriding message, determined already at the outset of a story, a ‘plot’ is rather how that message is played out over time through actions and events.” Characterising the biennial form as situated and polyvocal, Rosendahl considers the ways in which it contributes to the diversification of historical narration in public exhibition, against the backdrop of what some have described as a ‘historiographical turn’ in museological and other modes of public art exhibition.
In the review by Kathrin Böhm of the role of exhibition within her expanded art practice, and in the accompanying conversation between Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Gavin Wade and Franciska Zólyom moderated by Mick Wilson, there is a consideration of how exhibiting as a field of operations may operate in two quite different registers. On the one hand, there is a discussion of exhibiting strategies that foreground usership rather than spectatorship, premising operations other than those of thematic display and representation. These modes of exhibition still utilize the terms of showing and display, however they also mobilise other economies that seem to exceed the prototypical circulation of the gaze and distribution of viewership within the exhibition of art as such. On the other hand, the focus of the discussion turns to a projected exhibitionary strategy of public review and the artist’s intention to use an exhibitionary process to review the arc of her practice to date. This proposition of exhibition as compost pile and exhibiting as composting, proposes that the terms of the practice are re-evaluated and transposed beyond the terms of “yet another project.” Composting as curator Gavin Wade begins the discussion, is an invitation to consider “the idea of place, connecting it to the social space in which things come together. The compost heap needs to accumulate in one place. It needs time. It needs to create its own ecology. It needs worms. It needs layers.”
Steven Henry Madoff proposes a reconsideration of the idea of the friend, as a proposition of difference rather than sameness. This revised understanding of friendship is connected to an approach towards understanding political imaginaries of exhibition. He writes: “Friendness offers a thinking about exhibitions as sites of unsameness that can include sameness, that afford the accommodation of handedness within the unevenness of the world.” Curators, Maddoff puts forward, create networks of connections that produce new political relations–in what he posits as forms of proximity where sameness and difference are operative. It is a desire for an intimacy within a renewed politics of exhibition and exhibiting.