Over three issues of PARSE 28 contributions have approached “the question of exhibition” from myriad positions and contexts. The contributions have moved between close readings of exhibitionary projects, analysis of the historical and political conditions of exhibition, to more abstracted reflections on the very notion of making public. Introducing the third and final part of this series, it is tempting to reach for conclusions–or at the very least an “answer” to the “question” of exhibition. Looking back over the three issues, however, it feels important to treat the different registers, lenses and forms through which the “question of exhibition” has been approached as the necessary prompt to refuse a totalizing summary–to acknowledge that it is precisely in asking the question of exhibition, rather than offering a single answer, that its productive, generative, often contradictory potential resides.
The restless questioning of exhibition underpins Part 3, where artists curators and researchers unpick exhibition’s entangled relationship to pedagogy, to institutional processes, to aesthetics, to constituent work, to lived experience and the ways in which the political arises out of these entanglements. The issue includes texts by Doreen Mende, David Morris and Grace Samboh, Ola Hassanain, Li Yizhuo, Ginevra Ludovici, Cătălin Gheorghe, Sabine Dahl Nielsen, a visual essay by Paul O’Neill and a roundtable with Jeanne van Heeswijk, Maria Hlavajova, Damon Reaves & Mick Wilson
In the introduction of Part 2 we identified as a certain push and pull between what we described as the “onto-epistemological” register of exhibition and its “operational” character–a tension between the exhibition’s capacity, or promise of world-making and the material, structural and linguistic instruments that determine exhibitionary practice. This seems a useful step in attending to the different ways we might approach, if not exactly define exhibition and, in a sense look beyond the study of exhibition as it has been structured either through a different polarity between the epistemological claims of curatorial discourse or and the detailed analyses of singular case studies that comprise exhibition histories. There is a need to consider the question of exhibition in a way that draws from–but is not constrained by–both approaches. Extending this, and with the current set of contributions firmly in mind, it seems important to consider the question, limits and what may be termed the “violence” of representation, as the force that attracts and repels these two registers: The constant wrestling with representation, and the (im)possibility to move beyond its horizon, haunts exhibition. Within part 3, exhibition’s relationship with representation is brought to the fore. The contributions point to the ways in which the persistent troubling of representation within exhibition produces an (in)ability to project futures, to attend to the messiness of the everyday, to transmit the nuances and divergent modes of community and collectivity; to scale up; to enact, rather than illustrate inquiry and educational process.
Opening the issue is Doreen Mende’s self-described part essay, part diary “Endlessly from the middle, or, Towards curatorial/politics.” For Mende the question of representation and how we might “look beyond it”–drawing upon the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva–frames her situated reflection on the exhibition and her arrival at “curatorial/politics.” Proposing “in-hibition” as an alternative to the ontological violence that defines ex-hibiting, Mende invites us to “re-own, re-create, de/recompose the means of making public by rehearsing the practices of disengaging with cultures of domination.”
Ola Hassanain takes on the prospect of rethinking inside / outside from the perspective of architecture and the built environment. While Mende approaches the curatorial as necessarily “starting from the middle,” Hassanain shares a similar wariness with respect to the dichotomy of inside / outside. “Dichotomies,” she writes are the epistemological dilemma of spatial training.” Drawing on the theoretical framework of the Black Outdoors and in particular a conversation by Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, Hassanain invites us to think of forms of architecture, and in turn exhibiting that go beyond questions of function and ownership.
Extending the propositional nature of exhibition is Cătălin Gheorghe’s “Farewell to Research. Welcome to Rescription.” Originally delivered as a lecture during the 9th Bucharest Biennale curatorial workshop “Handfuls thrown into air and scattered over earth” in June 2020, this playful, provocative and complex text refuses to let the history of exhibition and its institutional formation determine its potential for the future. Gheorghe invites us to consider it as a potential medium for an “insurgent message.” Responding to the question of how the exhibition may be differently approached as apparatus, genre and poetic, and with particular attention to the claims of research practices, he proposes anumber of strategic possibilities of “rescription” and the ways in which the exhibition might operate as “xeno-spaces” that will act as (rather than represent) experiential, political and sensorial spaces.
Shifting register and tone, though no less propositional, is an extended roundtable with artist Jeanne van Heeswijk and Maria Hlavajova, Damon Reaves and Mick Wilson. By revisiting two large scale exhibition projects “Philladelphia Assembled” and “Trainings for the Not-Yet” readers are invited into a considered recounting of exhibition processes and what van Heeswijk describes as the “protocols of engagement” that determine the ways in which she enters into conversation with communities and institutions. For van Heeswijk the proposition of exhibition, and across the constituents she works with, lies in its ability to “perform and assemble” within an institutional setting, whereby objects and their arrival in institutional contexts become conduits for a restaging of community, a series of props and instruments to prepare for a world to come.
David Morris and Grace Samboh’s essay invites us to consider the exhibition as festival. Through a retracing of the BINAL Experimental Arts ’92, staged in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Morris and Samboh imagine forms of exhibition and making public that are not constrained by the representational formats and norms that have defined certain (Euro and US centric) understandings of exhibition. “What,” they ask, “if we were to imagine an exhibition format deriving from the internal logic of the work (…)?” This seemingly simple question, unfolds as a fundamental challenge to the logics of exhibiting, its modes of representation and the eventhood of biennial culture.
Sabine Dahl Nielsen’s “Njangi House: SAVVY CONTEMPORARY and the Postmigrant Condition” approaches exhibition through institutional modes of operation. Looking to the different facets of the Berlin based SAVVY, including its organizational and programmatic constitution, Dahl draws parallels with the “postmigrant society.” In this reading, SAVVY’s refusal to represent migrant communities (and commitment rather to engage the “postmigrant condition” through a cross-institutional approach) collapses the divide between programming exhibiting and organizational structures, or Hassanain’s dichotomy of inside / outside.
Ginevra Ludovici offers a concise recounting of the so-called “educational turn” in curating. Ludovici employs a series of recent cases studies to indicate the ways in which curatorial and institutional practice took on pedagogical devices and structures following the Bologna Accords, and the critique of this so-called “educational turn.” The three cases–“Metabolic Museum-University (MM-U)” (2019); “The Tree School” (established 2014); and “The Knowledge Market: Speculative Collective” (2019)–took place across different institutional and exhibitionary formats and contexts but offer fascinating examples of the stakes, limitations and possibilities of forms of exhibition as school or counter-pedagogical practice. Concluding Ludovici’s examination of these three projects there is a certain caution expressed at the ways in which education and pedagogy can be both instrumentalised and represented within exhibition formats in formulaic and co-opted ways.
Returning to the relationship between research and exhibition practices approached in parts one and two of the issue series, Li Yizhuo looks to two exhibitions at RedCat in Beijing. The essay draws on curator Chen Shuyu’s proposition of “curatorial spatiality” and the historiography of experimental Chinese art from the 1980s. Within this issue’s constellation of contributions, Li’s analysis points to the ways in which space is used as a method within exhibition practice to draw out relationships with both ideas and practices. Architectural and scenographic devices become ways of instantiating, rather than representing research, where references to exhibition histories for example are not merely documentary but appear spatially and materially.
Closing the third part of our issue On the Question of Exhibition, is a visual essay by Paul O’Neill. Drawing from the curator’s archive of thousands of images from his exhibition making practice, and focusing on one arc of this practice from 2003-2016 -from the cumulative exhibition series “Coalesce” to the “We Are the Center for Curatorial Studies” and “WE ARE THE (EPI)CENTRE”–the image sequence proposes ways of thinking the exhibition as a nexus of relation and exhibition-making as sustained and cumulative practice, in ways that exceed the established terms of analysis of “the white cube,” say. Mixing images drawn from different stages within the exhibition-making process, the push and pull between the onto-epistemological register of exhibition making and its “operational” register re-emerge, precisely through a move away from representational tactics in favour of formal, spatial, and material evocations, calling up propositions put forward by Li. The image sequence is not a formal documentation as such, nor a re-creation of exhibition through online simulacrum, but rather a visual thinking through moments of an exhibition-making practice
We, as editors, would like to thank all the contributors to the three parts of “On the Question of Exhibition,” as well as the many colleagues who have peer-reviewed contributions and offered valuable input to the shaping of the issues. We are delighted that the work begun in this issue will continue with the forthcoming volume Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination, co-edited by Cătălin Gheorghe and Mick Wilson, part of the series “Vector –critical research in context,” published by VECTOR, “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iasi, in partnership with PARSE Journal, University of Gothenburg. In the longer term, we are also delighted that the launch of Part 3 of this Issue of PARSE also marks the beginning of our partnership with Afterall Books: Exhibition Histories, allowing a sustained dialogue across two research and publishing platforms with the hope of extending the inquiries begun in “On the Question of Exhibition.”