some notes from day three

Curatorial Workshop

| 23-26 June 2020 |

Bucharest Biennale

Time is a little more pressing this evening, so the notes are necessarily much briefer. However, there is a space for you to add comments on the bottom of the page of notes from the first day (go here) if you wish to provide additional material in relation to today’s discussions.

online exhibitions

We began with a discussion of the mobilization of “exhibition” online. The breakout groups seem for the most part to have started the discussion from the perspective of each participant and their own experience with this question, whether as a viewer of such online exhibitions; or working in an institution making the transfer online, or indeed deciding to refrain from this move online; or as an independent curator, artist or film-maker operating already in online fora: or as an educator working with graduating students making the move online in the context of Covid19 etc.

Lisa Moran , Edith Doove, Krisztián Török and Akansha Rastogi gave the summary from the respective groups. There was quite a divergence of responses from the groups, with prominent themes emerging in each group which were substantially different. For example one group identified intimacy as a theme, seeming to refer to the intimacy of the screen interface often happening in “private” spaces, but also with an individualized address (the image of one person at a computer screen viewing rather than a bunch of people spectating together at a screen). Another group identified that the power dynamics in institutions adopting new online strategies for addressing new and established “publics” seemed to have changed subtly, so that the normally rigid hierarchies were shifted and loosened by the recognition of new knowledge needs and new forms of co-working to achieve a new form of institutional presentation. Another group emphasized the opportunity to avoid a transfer of “exhibition” online, and saw rather a moment when new formats and new modalities might emerge so that the exhibitionary impulse would be recalibrated to the specificities of digital-network distributed viewing. One figure proposed was that of the exhibition becoming a living document online. Another group focussed on educational settings and the way graduating students had been prepared for the spatial and physical question of display of work, but had not been prepared for this online model at all. There was also a reference to the non uniform distribution of network access and the means of communication. Others pointed to the ways in which institutions that had been reluctant or unsure of how to establish an online presence of any sort previously, were now moving in this direction because of the pandemic situations.

Temporality was a theme that emerged in different ways. On the one hand there was the way the pandemic had for some institutions created an interruption to the incessant productivity drive of pursuing visibility and attention from publics, and all the endless though not clearly generative activity of institutional life, and so created a moment of pause, reflection, revaluation (an interruption to the exhausting excess of positivity, diagnosed by Byung-Chul Han as mentioned by Henk Slager yesterday). In this pause the question of enquiry, of thinking along a longer arc and of slowing down the cycles of display were also becoming possible and becoming purposive not simply reactive to the needs of the pandemic situations. In a related manner, some spoke of the time of viewing as becoming re-structured in online spaces, so that the move between tele-co-presence or synchronous moments and asynchronous moments of encounter with works and with people were retuning how time factored in the viewing experience. On the other hand, in some countries, Vanessa Garcia indicated the Philippines as one example, this interruption to life by covid19 was effectively shutting down all cultural activities and institutions were forced into hiatus.

Nick Aikens

Aikens opened his presentation by stating the basic terms of his doctoral research which pertained to the 1990s and the political imaginaries elaborated within certain sites of the art world, a project located within the context of a wider programme to re-think that decade and its relationships with the current conjunction of ‘European’ cultural politics and political imaginaries.

Next he identified some of the sources which had framed the question of the “research” “exhibition,” noting a 2006 paper by Biggs et al., that dealt with the exhibition in terms of its possible equivalences and divergences from the textual report of a formal academic research undertaking. He then cited Paul O’Neill & Mick Wilson, Irit Rogoff, Simon Sheikh, and Beatrice von Bismarck as sources on research and exhibition-making suggesting that Sheikh provided the most useful source with respect to the specificity of exhibition as a site of research, and not as simply a disclosure of a research process accomplished somewhere else and then communicated or mediated in exhibition. Citing the contrast Sheikh proposes between recherche and forschung, Aikens proposed that recherche (with a journalistic sense contrasted with the more formal and scientific sense of forschung) might be a serviceable term for the idea of research conducted through exhibition.

From there Aikens proceeded to briefly profile some examples of exhibitions, that enacted some form of research agenda within the exhibition mode itself.

The Street. A Form of Living Together, Van Abbemuseum, 1972
The Other Story, Afro-Asian Artists in Post War Britain, South-Bank Centre, 1989
Short Century. Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 Museum various venues, 2001-2002
Telling History: An Archive and Three Case Studies, Munich Kunsteverin, 2003
The Academy. Various venues, 2006 (still not sure about including this)
The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989, ZKM, 2012
Animism, various venues, 2009 – 2014 (not discussed because of time)
Defiant Muses, Reina Sofia, 2019-20 (not discussed because of time)

Among the ideas introduced one was that of ‘microhistory’ as a means to avoid a totalizing move or a kind of historical treatise in “the 90s.”

In the discussion the question of decolonizing/the decolonial with respect to the research project was mooted, and specifically that there was a substantial restriction to North Western European (Ireland, UK, German located … O’Neill & Wilson, Rogoff, Sheikh, and von Bismarck) sources when there were so many other sources that might be mobilized (especially in terms of the 1990s changes in curatorial discursive production) e.g., Abu el Dahab; Brzyski; Zabel; Misiano; WHW; Fowkes; Grzinic; Filipovic; Voinea; Badovinac; Pejic; Piotrowski; Stamenkovic; Forgacs; Piskur…  In responding, Aikens acknowledged that the criticism was on point and that he recognized that he should have used a different subset of sources to initiate the discussion.

Maxime Gourdon

Gourdon introduced his contribution to the workshop as being a way to communicate his research concerns within the terms available to him at present, in the absence of other means such as physical spatial display or artist commission etc. The work was in the form of a ‘lecture-essay’ (something akin to a ‘film-essay.’) A term of imnterest for him was “strabismus” describing a situation where the eyes do not alignin quite the same direction with each other, but rather cross, when looking at an object.

In announcing the piece’s title “How is it that you are how you are when you tell yourself out,” he began a precisely paced and meditative reading of a text that was also visible on a scrolling website that revealed the text slowly and methodically, the lines of white text on a seemingly starry black ground, interspersed with these very simple animated line diagrams and images derived from historical Arabic astronomical texts.

Rather than attempt to summarize his text, which seems inappropriate (something like writing an abstract for a poem) it is perhaps more helpful to direct the reader to the online version of the text. However, it should be emphasized that the sense of a tele-co-presence and the distributed, but nonetheless collective, experience of his performed text generated a very particular sense of being together and brought under the sway of an “event.” The text is here: http://maximegourdon.com/bucharest-readinghow-is-it-that-you-are-copy.html

In the discussion that followed questions about the format, about the sources referenced, about the language considerations, and about how this work was situated within the Qayyem process were explored. A common theme in the discussions seemed to be that people had been acted upon by the reading in some way so as to recalibrate their attentiveness and focus as both embodied at a concrete physical site and connected through the cables of digital network and the filaments of affect winding out from Gourdon’s meditation.

One question that we did not get to ask, but which I think might helpfully be posted here was from Dina Akhmadeeva: “a lot of my research is interested in vision and optics and what is beyond vision (e.g. visionary), and I’m wondering if it’s appropriate to ask in this context of Maxime’s research into optics through Arab science does something to problematize (“distort”, to take a visual metaphor) the relationship articulated by Anselm yesterday between the visible and the knowable?”

break-out discussions groups

The break-out groups were based on a set of elective topics that followed up on issues raised by the previous presentations.