How are understandings of the ‘global’ and the ‘located’ differently shaped through contemporary art presented to publics in disparate contexts and times? How have curators experimented significantly with the exhibition form? How have artists experimented with what is possible with exhibitions? How do exhibitions connect with – or develop into – longer-term projects, through recurring events, instituent practices and institution building? These are among the questions explored here.

This research is developed in close relation with Afterall’s Exhibition Histories book series, doctoral students and the Exhibition Studies research master’s programme at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, and with the support of our project partners: Asia Art Archive, based in Hong Kong; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York; and the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg.

https://www.afterall.org/research/art-becoming-public/

 

Another is the shift in focus away from the individual artist or artwork, towards the exhibition as a meaningful object of art historical inquiry.

 

 Do exhibition histories represent a specific methodology? An archival strategy? A conceptual approach? What is the relationship of exhibition histories to nations and canons, to post-colonial critique, and to the interdisciplinary terrain of cultural studies, more broadly? And finally, what is gained and what is lost by delineating exhibition histories as a separate field or subfield within the study of art history?

Antti Laherto University of Helsinki

Students focus their questions and research on museums, galleries, and other forums for display, including alternative sites, communities, borders, and places. 

We challenge students to consider the shifting and expanding role of visual culture to society and to scrutinize how methods of display alter, inhibit, or promote the work of artists.(San Francisco Art Institute)

Exhibitions as Research contends that museums would be more attractive to both researchers and audiences if we consider exhibitions as knowledge-in-the-making rather than platforms for disseminating already-established insights. Analysing the theoretical underpinnings and practical challenges of such an approach, the book questions whether it is possible to exhibit knowledge that is still in the making, whilst also considering which concepts of "knowledge" apply to such a format. The book also considers what the role of audience might be if research is extended into the exhibition itself. 

Providing concrete case studies of projects where museum professionals have approached exhibition making as a knowledge-generating process, the book considers tools of application and the challenges that might emerge from pursuing such an approach. Theoretically, the volume analyses the emergence of exhibitions as research as part of recent developments within materiality theories, object-oriented ontology and participatory approaches to exhibition-making.

«An exciting provocation of exhibition histories is what they might occasion as historical method. We primarily reconstruct past exhibitions through written accounts, often based upon first-hand experience or archival materials. The phenomenological dimension of the exhibition—that which cannot be recreated, if we want to see it as something contingent upon its specific temporality, publics, and milieu—is thus captured through writing as affective recollection or as research-based speculation. As stories, exhibition histories may be more connected to memory studies as much as art history. The story of an exhibition creates something else, an exhibition as memory that takes on a life of its own in distinction to the exhibition as lived experience. As such, how might exhibition histories help us better understand the historicity of historical imagination? What I mean by that is the way that exhibitions bring historical imagination into being, and how the exhibition’s reincarnation as exhibition history also constructs an historical present».

Students focus their questions and research on museums, galleries, and other forums for display, including alternative sites, communities, borders, and places. 

We challenge students to consider the shifting and expanding role of visual culture to society and to scrutinize how methods of display alter, inhibit, or promote the work of artists.

(San Francisco Art Institute)