Fall semester 2023: Two classes within the framework of the course “Curating” (course conducted together with Peter Alexander van der Meijden)
MA level, art history, comparative litterature, modern culture, visual culture, media studies
Course title: “Curating”, titles of the classes taught by D.I.:
“Thought Exhibition: the philosopher as curator” (section: History of exhibitions)
“Researching landmark exhibitions through digital re-enactment” (section: Virtual recreations of exhibitions)
Course Description:
The course aims to provide the student with competencies in exhibition theory and practice with a view to carrying out curatorial tasks in museums, galleries, art galleries, etc. The student is given the opportunity to acquire knowledge of and experience with current exhibition aesthetics, methods, analysis and practice (curating) within a field of art, design or architectural history with a view to independent or group-based organization, planning and assessment of an exhibition or a partial aspect of an exhibition. Furthermore, the course enables the student to develop exhibition concepts, to formulate curatorial intentions and to critically evaluate these. Finally, the course aims to enable students to methodically discuss exhibition aesthetics based on theoretically grounded approaches to curating, exhibitions and exhibition phenomena, and to practice exhibition analysis.
In the examination the student can demonstrate:
Knowledge and understanding of
- exhibition aesthetics in a historical perspective,
- the aesthetic, institutional, architectural and economic components involved in the realization of a coherent exhibition idea,
- dissemination and communication strategies related to exhibition production,
- analytical and theoretical approaches to curating, exhibitions and exhibition phenomena.
Skills in
- present a coherent and independently prepared exhibition idea (an exhibition concept) in relation to its aesthetic, institutional, architectural and economic aspects,
- methodically discuss aesthetic and curatorial issues in exhibitions,
- contextualize and analyze specific exhibitions and exhibition phenomena historically and theoretically,
- systematically analyze specific curatorial issues, exhibitions and exhibition phenomena from theoretically relevant perspectives.
Competences to
- develop exhibition ideas in relation to specific contexts and institutions,
- explore relevant funding opportunities for exhibitions in the form of funds and to prepare applications for them,
- develop dissemination and communication strategies for exhibitions,
- communicate his/her ideas in a clear, well-structured and grammatical correct language.
Session 5: Thought Exhibition: The Curator as Philosopher (DI) October 3, 2023, 14:00–17:00
The session will take as its starting point the notion of “Thought Exhibition”, developed by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel during four exhibitions at the ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany). The notion can be broadly interpretated, as the four exhibitions were centered around widely differing topics, from the significance of iconoclasm in contemporary societies, to a political assembly and agency of “things”, to the limitations and biases of the epistemes produced and fostered by European Modernity, to the interdependence between these epistemes and the upheavals of the Anthropocene. The session will analyze the concept of thought exhibition in two ways, (i) theoretical and (ii) historical: (i) It will compare it with other concepts of an “expanded” notion of curating and exhibiting, such as “The Curatorial” (Lind, Rogoff et al.), “The Exhibitionary” (Rito) and “Research Exhibition” (Lind, Voorhies et al.). (ii) We will further compare the first and probably most renown Thought Exhibition, “Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art” (2002), with the 1985 Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) exhibition “Les Immatériaux”, co-curated by Jean-François Lyotard under the impression of his analysis of a postmodern society (his widely influential “report”, La condition postmoderne, had been published in 1979). Both exhibitions are today considered as landmark exhibitions and are currently subject of a joint research project between ZKM and Centre Pompidou, an effort to virtual recreate, or re-enact, both exhibitions as research environments (“Beyond Matter: Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality”). The course will return to this project in session 9, Researching Landmark Exhibitions through Digital Re-enactment (DI)).
Session 9: Researching landmark exhibitions through digital re-enactment (DI) November 7, 2023, 14:00–17:00
This session will discuss virtual recreations, or re-enactments, of exhibitions, both as means of historical research and as providing virtual alternatives during periods of pandemic restrictions. We will discuss the above-mentioned research project “Beyond Matter: Cultural Heritage on the Verge of Virtual Reality” with the project team leader at ZKM, the researcher and curator Silvia Lívia Nolasco-Rozsas. To also discuss an example of an exhibition realized, in parts, during pandemic lockdown cognition, we will focus on the last Thought Exhibition realized by Latour and Weibel at ZKM, “Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics” (2020–2022), the opening of which ended up being in the period of the first European COVID-19 lockdowns (May 2020). For that reason, an online platform had to be developed within a quite short period of time to make the exhibition – or rather an interpretation of it – available for an online audience. Sebastian Lübeck, designer and one of the developers of this platform, will join us for a talk. With both guests we will discuss the advantages and limitations of transferring or re-enacting art exhibitions – which usually take place in the spatio-aesthetic or phenomenological realm of an exhibition space – in the “two-dimensional”, audiovisual space of a screen (be it a computer screen or the screen of a VR headset).