Setting the Tone of the Exhibition (prologue body)

Artistic Director: Carol Yinghua Lu
Curator: Jacob Fabricius
Artists: Nina Beier, Julie Falk, Kasper Hesselbjerg, Jesper Just, Louise Lawler, boma pak, Rhett Tsai, Ella Wang Olsson, Jiawei Zheng

Setting the Tone of the Exhibition (prologue body) at Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, brings together works by nine international artists and explores how minimal artistic gestures—like sound, sculpture, and performance—can shape, theme, and form an exhibition. It examines how works can be placed and positioned to orchestrate, guide, and influence the way the audience walks through an exhibition, hence how they experience the works.

The exhibition is connected to the overall theme and project Setting the Tone of the Exhibition – The Anatomy of Exhibition Openings that researches the methodology of exhibition making.

Setting the Tone of the Exhibition looks at how curators and artists address the complexities of shaping an exhibition, focusing on where it truly begins—not just with the opening, but in the curatorial decisions made beforehand. Through titles, graphic design, Social Media, locations, spatial narratives, artworks, books, performances, and seminars, curators set the tone for the viewer’s first encounter with the exhibition.