The Exhibitionist
Journal on Exhibition Making
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice remarks, “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things”; to which her counterpart, the impenetrable Humpty Dumpty, replies: “The question is which [meaning] is to be master—that’s all.”
With issue 11 of The Exhibitionist, we once again take up the question of meaning, looking back to the contested and contorted term “curator” as a springboard for inquiry into contemporary curatorial practices. Tracing this question of how to define the role of the curator and his or her labor, The Exhibitionist invites case studies, self-reflections, and essays from working curators around the world.
In issue 11, these perspectives often center on questions of geopolitical space, as many of the authors consider projects anchored outside the art world’s usual transatlantic center. In “Curators’ Favorites,” Guy Brett writes about Cildo Meireles’s O Sermão da Montanha: Fiat Lux, “a work about potential [that presses] sharply on a tension point between repression and release.” Natasha Ginwala recalls The One Year Drawing Project, an exhibition of works by four Sri Lankan artists whose lengthy exchange of drawings crisscrossed a war-torn nation. And rather than considering a single exhibition, the curator Vincent Honoré looks at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Geneva, which he calls a “machine for exhibiting.”
In the “Assessments” section, Claire Bishop, Cristina Freire, Tobi Maier, and Octavio Zaya consider the 2014 exhibition Histórias Mestiças, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz for the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo. In “Rigorous Research,” the scholar Vittoria Martini examines the little-discussed 1970 Venice Biennale, bringing attention to an exhibition that embraced experimentation and research in a state of bureaucratic stasis. Research and reflection also connect the two essays in “Rear Mirror,” as Ruba Katrib reflects on her exhibition Puddle, pothole, portal, and Scott Rothkopf considers his recent Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In “Six x Six,” the curators Ionit Behar, Astria Suparak, Inti Guerrero, Gianni Jetzer, Sarah Demeuse, and Nikola Dietrich reflect on six exhibitions of note in their personal canons.
In “Attitude,” João Ribas deliberates the recent expansion of the term “curating” into an ever-widening field no longer specific to art or artifacts. Emphasizing the spatial and temporal character of exhibitions, he makes a case for a clarification and reclamation of the term “curating.” In “Back in the Day,” Clémentine Deliss contends with the notorious 1984 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern and compares it with a recent exhibition by the Senegalese artist and curator El Hadji Sy. In this issue’s “Missing in Action” section, we revisit Rasheed Araeen‘s polemical essay for his 1989 exhibition of British Afro-Asian artists, “The Other Story,” which attempted to dismantle the chauvinism of a “master art history” that had excluded non-Western contemporary artists.
The Exhibitionist is a journal made by curators, for curators, focusing solely on the practice of exhibition making. The objective is to create a wider platform for the discussion of curatorial concerns, to encourage a diversification of curatorial models, and to actively contribute to the formation of a theory of curating.
The Exhibitionist: Journal on Exhibition Making
Editor: Jens Hoffmann
Senior Editor: Julian Myers-Szupinska
Associate Editor and Publications Manager: Liz Glass
Web Editor: Stephanie Harris
Editor at Large: Chelsea Haines
Copy Editor: Lindsey Westbrook
Design: Jon Sueda / Stripe Friends of Exhibitionists: Jack Kirkland, Elisa Nuyten, Ross Sappenfield, Luisa Strina, Julia Reyes Taubman, and VIA Art
Editorial board: Maurice Berger, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Okwui Enwezor, Patrick Flores, Massimiliano Gioni, Mary Jane Jacob, Maria Lind, Carol Yinghua Lu, Chus Martínez, Jessica Morgan, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Adriano Pedrosa, João Ribas, Gayatri Sinha, Christine Tohmé
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