The Exhibitionist
Journal on Exhibition Making
www.the-exhibitionist.com
Invited in 1989 to produce an imaginary exhibition, the Belgian curator Jan Hoet recoiled: For him, an exhibition was the result of a “spontaneous moment” articulated in a specific place. “These concrete items,” he replied, “the work of art and the place, are integral aspects of making an exhibition.” The Exhibitionist‘s tenth issue marks Hoet’s passing by republishing his 1989 conversation “L’exposition imaginaire—Contradiction in Terms?” in the “Missing in Action” section.
Following the format established in issue 9, issue 10 presents a “Rigorous Research” essay, this time by Prem Krishnamurthy on the work of East German designer Klaus Wittkugel, who put advanced exhibition design to work for a Stalinist ideology in the 1950s. In “Curators’ Favorites,” Wassan Al-Khudhairi writes on the 1994 exhibition Forces of Change: Artists in the Arab World, an exhibition that influenced her own part in founding Mathaf, the first museum of modern art in Qatar. Matthias Muehling explores the disconcerting inheritance of the Degenerate Art (1937) exhibition in Nazi-era Germany, while Dominic Willsdon surveys Playgrounds: Reinventing the Square (2014), which drives him to challenge museums’ aspirations of openness, play, and publicness.
For “Back in the Day,” Geir Haraldseth inspects the ambitions of Poetry Must Be Made By All! Transform the World! (1969), arguing for the continued relevance of the political commitment demonstrated by the curator Ronald Hunt in his exhibition for the Moderna Museet. In “Six x Six,” the curators Zoe Butt, Nazli Gürlek, Daniel Muzyczuk, Remco de Blaaij, Patrick D. Flores, and Nicolaus Schafhausen enumerate personally influential shows, and in the process tweak the canon of exhibitions now coming into view.
For the first time, the “Assessments” section contends with a solo exhibition: Philippe Parreno’s 2013 retrospective Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World. Florence Ostende, Pierre-François Galpin, Anne Dressen, and Liam Gillick offer various approaches to Parreno’s Palais de Tokyo exhibition. In “Attitude,” Martin Waldmeier deliberates the independent curator’s fraught navigation of the art world’s propositional economy, citing the dual identity engendered by the proposal-driven system. And in “Rear Mirror,” Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy looks back on her Mercosul Biennial, describing how her concepts for the exhibition unraveled and took new shapes, while Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton reflect on their Hammer Museum exhibition Take It or Leave It, discussing their careful negotiation of the limits of historical surveys.
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
Editors-at-Large: Tara McDowell, Chelsea Haines
Copy Editor: Lindsey Westbrook
Design Director: Jon Sueda
Exhibitionist Friends: Jack Kirkland, Elisa Nuyten, Ross Sappenfield, Luisa Strina, Julia Reyes Taubman, and VIA Art
Editorial board: 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 Tohme
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