Research exhibitions:
Some sources

Notes from the 2020 Curatorial Workshop | 23-26 June 2020 |Bucharest Biennale.

Sørensen, Trine Friis (2017) “Precarious Construct: The Commission as a Curatorial Mode of Inquiry“, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, No. 52 (2016), pp. 79–98. In an interesting framing of her practice, the author discusses a curatorial project she conducted in relation to the Danish Radio Archive (the DR Archive) by commissioning two artists, Kajsa Dahlberg and Olof Olsson, to engage with the archive and produce artworks in relation to it. Focusing on the practice of commissioning rather than its outcome, the article proposes to consider commissioning as a curatorial mode of inquiry.

Niedderer, Kristina & Biggs, M. & Ferris, M.. (2006). “The Research Exhibition: Context interpretation and knowledge creation“. The authors, take a somewhat conservative position, seeming to think of exhibition only as a moment of communication of pre-existing research, and indicate that: ”In this paper, we set out to investigate the nature, role and purpose of the research exhibition. The idea of the research exhibition was put forward some time ago with a paper by Rust and Robertson (2003) who have considered it with regard to its potential as a means of communication for research. This seemed a promising approach, but remained at a stage of initial exploration. The problem has been little developed since, yet the desire for the use of the research exhibition persists. Furthermore the use of the exhibition within research brings with it certain problems that remain as yet unresolved. For example at present, it is not clear whether, and in which way, the research exhibition is different from an ordinary exhibition, what its essential contribution to research might be, and how that contribution is to be archived and disseminated. We use this paper to address some of these problems.”

Fowkes, Maja and Reuben (2015) “Renewing the Curatorial Refrain: Sustainable Research in Contemporary Art.” in Paul O’Neill & Mick Wilson (eds.) Curating Research. “In addition to the distraction of territorial infighting with other art professionals, curatorial research is frequently hampered by time constraints; with a project timeline of a year or two at the most and the need to multi-task on numerous aspects of exhibition production, curators tend to cut straight to the chase rather than pursuing the careful, scholarly excavation of a topic. After an exhibition is completed, the curator will typically move on, falling foul of the ‘what’s your next project’ mantra and leaving art historians to pick up the pieces of their high-profile interventions. At the same time, the characteristic curatorial approach to researching an idea can be distinguished from the practice of most art historians. This can be felt, for example, in the outcomes of curatorial research, which rarely ends in the writing of a text but rather tends to spread irresistibly into multiple forms – from a film screening to an exhibition, from a panel discussion to a full-blown conference. The inclination to spread across several formats allows curators to approach problems from myriad directions, offering a more nuanced perspective than purely academic or discourse-based research. Expanding beyond the exhibition frame also enables contemporary curatorial research to be contextualised through wider discursive perspectives and understood as a work-in-progress, with each new element – a text commissioned for a publication, a series of interviews or a symposium – providing an opportunity to generate fresh knowledge.”