Exhibition / Exhibitionary
Multiple authors • 2/1/25
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The Lexicon is an ongoing project begun by the international Curatorial Studies Workshop, which is part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN). The initial idea was to locate each member’s take on key terms often taken for granted in the curatorial field—such as curating, curatorial, exhibition, exhibitionary, representation, and so forth. We quickly discovered that as fundamental as these terms are, they didn’t carry the same meaning for each of us. The Lexicon stimulated a process of mutual understanding while forming a common ground for a cumulative, multi-perspective dialogue. It was an exercise focused not on finding the “most valid” argument, but on the cumulative—and, in a lot of ways, curatorial—juxtaposition built on the collective reflection and dialogue. For The Curatorial, we will continue to build on what we started, adding new definitions/propositions for terms over time to continue a dialogue that we hope will be beneficial and provocative for all those interested in the field and who appreciate the plasticity of meaning and experience so essential to the work we do. The Lexicon is, therefore, not intended to suggest or offer a clear and single definition for the terms proposed. Instead, it aims to generate a productive dialogue between definitions that can help map the variety of curatorial approaches, aesthetic imaginaries, and forms of practice. The Lexicon will stage this dialogue with monthly contributions from curators, artists, organizers, activists, academics, and critical thinkers.—Carolina Rito, Lexicon section editor
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Cătălin Gheorghe
An exhibition is commonly understood as a medium, a setting for artworks, or a statement. It is a display of artifacts, structures, ideas, and gestures in an organized way. The production and presentation of an exhibition are co-dependent on an institutional capacity or self-organized initiative, presented in a given space (i.e., museum, white cube, black box, public space, landscape), and to be received by different audiences.
Exhibitions have changed in approach and function over time. They have not only reacted against the idea of a prescribed political or natural order of display but also have questioned their space as a privileged site of capitalist forms of representation. In these conditions, the understanding of “exhibition” as predominantly a medium for displaying evocative manifestations of power would compromise the chances of seeing the exhibition as a process based on imaginative instances of criticism.
A radical use of the exhibition would be the transposition (as a trans[ex]position) of the actual political space and historical time of its event modeling, in Michel Foucault’s words, a relational heterotopia but also manifestations of heterocronia. The trans[ex]position of time and space would have the quality to intervene in multiple specific contexts creating different perspectives and unexpected situations. There would be different kinds of trans[ex]positions, from interventions based on hacking, to complex installations based on research. Opening new reflections on the potentiality of an exhibition, the trans[ex]position would make use of xeno-practices, redefining spaces of perception as xeno-spaces (as non-familiar spaces of thought and counteraction).
Hongjohn Lin
For any exhibition, we are always searching for something novel, original, or better yet, unprecedented. It is true that there is a plethora of exhibitions across diverse settings—museums, galleries, art fairs, community interventions, and biennials. Moreover, the expanding field of exhibitions is increasingly shifting from the physical to the virtual. Both spectators and art communities eagerly await the next event, just as social media feverishly fabricates fleeting memories of the latest spectacle—fifteen minutes of web fame, all too soon forgotten. We live in an era of hyper-metabolism of memory, where everything must go viral and fade rapidly, even faster than fashion trends. The more exhibitions proliferate, the less spectators seem able to recall what they have seen. This phenomenon promotes “exhibition amnesia,” an ideology that emphasizes the new while neglecting the past. Every new opening closes a door to what came before. The white cube, a dominant mode of exhibition display, symbolically ‘whitewashes’ memory, replacing it with interior installations surrounded by sterile drywalls. Exhibition spectatorship is driven by the demand for the novel, the immediate, and the up-to-the-minute, while past exhibitions serve only as references, easily becoming obsolete and forgotten. The genealogy of exhibitions reflects this shift, intertwined with the rise of modern museums in the 18th century and the development of capitalism, where the burgeoning bourgeoisie played a significant role in shaping museums as “public” spaces. As museums became more accessible, they began to reflect and reinforce the values and ideologies of emerging capitalist society, positioning exhibitions not only as new standardized displays but also as expressions of social relations mediated by capital.
Carolina Rito
An exhibition is a selected and curated presentation of objects in an institution of display or in an off-site where the display of artifacts is identified as an exhibition. It is typically curated by someone or a group of people and who are likely identified in the credits of the show as its curators.
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Cătălin Gheorghe
The exhibitionary apparatus generates certain perceptions of its intentions that often obscure its actual political privileges. It seeks to influence beliefs, reasons, and behaviors; and its rationale and modus operandi are ordering discourses that mask its power structure. These are consequences of its paradoxical presence, acting from a political distance but speaking in full proximity to the audience. In this way, its dominant normative views are mediated through direct concrete displays that, in effect, regulate its viewers’ perceptions. This only underscores the fact that its constitutive colonial derivation inflects it with a deeply negative political condition of hierarchical power.
Even if the exhibitionary moment seems to be not only ideological but also epistemologically compromised, there are substituent chances to overcome institutional conspiracies. Imagining a new, even radical, exhibitionary (social) design that would presuppose the use of present exhibition infrastructures to mediate reformations and reparations, or even revolutionary formulations against the reproduction of the exhibitionary’s underlying privileges.
Hongjohn Lin
In contrast to conventional exhibitions housed in the white cube, the "exhibitionary" moves beyond the gallery ideology, expanding into new forms of public engagement through screenings, performances, experiments, talks, and gatherings. These participatory actions reveal how the gallery ideology is constructed and how (art) histories are generated. The exhibitionary, in short, exposes the backstage mechanisms through which realities are shaped. By reconfiguring the dynamics between acting and enactment, the exhibitionary denaturalizes traditional exhibition formats. The conventional roles of artist, spectator, and curator are rewritten, disrupting the symbolic order to reveal how exhibitions construct reality. This approach aligns with various contemporary curatorial practices, including institutional critique, performativity, criticality, the educational turn, and the expanded field of exhibition-making.
Carolina Rito
The exhibitionary is the network of protocols and regimes (material, conceptual, epistemic, institutional, etc.) through which exhibitions are seen, conceptualized, and signified. Despite being mainly invisible, the exhibitionary is made manifest in very concrete forms. An exhibition’s arrangement of objects and discourse can be understood as the manifested artifact of the exhibitionary. In other words, and similar to Michel Foucault’s notion of “episteme,” the exhibitionary is a regime of intelligibility that pertains to displays as historical constructs. We can say that the defining frame of an exhibition is always a subset of the exhibitionary, which cannot be contained or even provide a totalizing view. Simply, the exhibitionary is the apparatus through which exhibitions surface or are made to surface. Instead, it is larger than the sum of its parts, in a cycle of constant evolution and transforming norms. As Keller Easterling has written about infrastructure, it can be said as well about the exhibitionary that it “is too big and not at one and the same place. It cannot be addressed through its shape or outline, but rather via its disposition—potentials unfolding in time and territory.” The exhibitionary depends on its activation in order to make sense.
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Cătălin Gheorghe is a theoretician, curator, editor, and Professor of Curatorial Research and Practices at “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași, Romania. He is the editor of Vector Publications, including the recent volumes Learning by curating. Current trajectories in critical curatorial research (2022) and Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination, co-edited with Mick Wilson (2021). He is also the curator of Vector Studio, a platform for critical research and art production based on the understanding of art as experimental journalism. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).
Hongjohn Lin is an artist, curator, and Professor at Taipei National University of the Arts, holding a PhD in Arts and Humanities from New York University. His notable exhibitions include the Taipei Biennial (2004, 2012), Asian Manchester Triennial (2008), and Guangzhou Triennial (2015). Lin curated the Taiwan Pavilion’s Atopia at the Venice Biennial (2007) and co-curated the Taipei Biennial with Tirdad Zolghadr (2010). He authored introductions for the Chinese editions of Art Power (Boris Groys) and Artificial Hells (Claire Bishop), and his publications include Poetics of Curating (2018). Lin is the founding editor of Curatography and is currently curating Asian Manchester Triennial 2025. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).
Carolina Rito is Professor of Critical Practice Research, at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities (CAMC), Coventry University, Coventry, UK. She leads the Centre’s Critical Practices research strand and co-leads Curatorial Research studies. She is a researcher and curator whose work explores “the Curatorial” as an investigative practice, expanding practice-based research in the fields of curating, visual arts, visual cultures, and cultural studies. Rito is a 2024 Fulbright Fellow at the School of Visual Arts New York; Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa; and Founding Editor of The Contemporary Journal. Rito is the co-editor of Institution as Praxis – New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research (Sternberg, 2020), Architectures of Education (e-flux Architecture, 2020), and FABRICATING PUBLICS: the dissemination of culture in the post-truth era (Open Humanities Press, 2021). Rito is editor of the “On Translations” (2018) and “Critical Pedagogies” (2019) issues of The Contemporary Journal). She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she taught from 2014 to 2016. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).