exhibition as enquiry

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

Thursday 25 June

In recent decades, there has been a widespread development of exhibitionary strategies around the display, communication, presentation, and realisation of artistic research and curatorial research processes, but also of exhibition as a constellation of enquiry enacted and unfolding rather than ‘put on show’. There has also been a lively development of ideas of ‘the curatorial’ that describe research and knowledge agendas in a way that is extended beyond, or contrasted with, the exhibition. There has also been a healthy skepticism with respect to the ease with which cognitive and epistemic terms are deployed.

What are the ways in which the exhibition has operated as a mode of enquiry in its own right? What are the ways in which artistic research has re-negotiated the terms of exhibition? What are the ways in which different ideas of ‘curatorial research’ / ‘curatorial knowledge’ / ‘the curatorial’ have re-positioned, re-thought or even problematised the exhibition? In what ways have non-art modes of exhibition been addressed within these debates? What might be the play between the expository and the essayistic tendencies of exhibition?

See some references on these questions here.

And here you will find some short notes from the third day of the workshop.