Exhibition Studies: Art in a Multipolar World

Arguably, nowadays, it is the transnational exhibition form, rather than works of art, that are the prime vehicle of meaning for contemporary art. The development of contemporary art since the late 1980s, through the emphasis on the exhibition rather than on the formulation of a new conception of art, has been largely shaped by the spread of international biennials and museums. The latest edition of the Venice Biennale titled Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere favours artists who have never participated in the International Exhibition, centring ‘the queer artist, the outsider artist, the folk artist, the indigenous artist’. As for documenta fifteen in 2022, curated by ruangrupa, the Jakarta-based collective invited 14 collectives from the Global South to participate. These collectives were part of a larger network that contributed to the concept of lumbung, (‘rice barn’ in Indonesian), used as a metaphor for collective sharing and resource management in the context of the exhibition The invited collectives then further extended the network by inviting additional participants, generating a project that foregrounded collectivity, sociality and decentralised organisation.
These recent events can be seen as the latest iterations of what the late curator Okwui Enwezor called ‘mega exhibitions and museums as transnational global forms’, which signal the inclusion of postcolonial subjects on the international art scene, offering a terrain for artists from former colonies and the Global South to address and bring local challenges into a dialogue with polycentric, networked, platforms.

This Think.Zone will look at the development of the exhibition-form since the 1980s, examining its spread and its function as the major agent for the blurring of cultural frames, and how it has come to shape the very notion of a ‘global art world, Situated in the context of post- and de-colonial discourses, the rise of the exhibition-form will be addressed as paralleling new political and ethical responsibilities, where exhibitions become sites of translation of the realities of the non-western, multi-polar world. This seminar will largely draw from the research and publications of the Afterall Research Centre. Founded in 1998 in London, for the past fifteen years, Afterall has been a major platform for the production and dissemination of conversations around art in the context of globalisation. Structured around teaching, reading, screenings, peer-learning, as well as occasional exhibitions visits, students will be invited to select texts from the Afterall catalogue and translate, collectively, relevant material into French, for publication in Issue.

References

● https://www.afterall.org/
● Thinking Historically in the Present, After Okwui: What is the Future of the Biennale? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRlvBhQJqtM&t=8s
● Lucy Steeds, et. al., Making Art Global (Part 2). Magiciens de la terre, London: Afterall Books, 2011. Introduction available at: https://www.afterall.org/articles/introduction-making-art-global-a-good-place-or-a-no-place-charles-esche/
● David Teh, ‘Who Cares a Lot? Ruangrupa as Curatorship’, Afterall, Issue 30, 2012, available at: https://www.afterall.org/articles/who-cares-a-lot-ruangrupa-as-curatorship/
● David Joselit, Heritage and Debt. Art in Globalization, Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2020.
● Sunil Shah, ‘The Rise (and Fall?) of the Postcolonial Documenta, Afterall, Issue 54, 2023, pp. 134–45.
Lotte Arndt, ‘Toxicity: Resisting Extraction through Collectivity at the 7th Lubumbashi Biennale’, Afterall, Issue 55–56, 2023, pp. 256–73.

Image: Documenta fifteen: Asia Art Archive, 2022, The Black Archives, 2022, installation view, Fridericianum, Kassel, June 11, 2022, photo: Frank Sperling