OnCurating, 33: documenta. Curating the History of the Present (2017)
Filed under journal | Tags: · art, art history, contemporary art, curating, exhibition
“On the occasion of documenta’s 14th edition, this special issue scrutinizes the ways in which the Kassel-based periodic exhibition has been contributing to curating the history of the present since its inception in 1955. The authors engage with questions of how documenta’s iterations played a significant role not only in the making of a history of contemporary art but also in the canon of the relatively young field of curatorial and exhibition studies.”
Contributions by Anna Sigrídur Arnar, Angela M. Bartholomew, Beatrice von Bismarck, Nanne Buurman, Anthony Gardner & Charles Green, Ayse Güleç, Kathryn M. Floyd, Walter Grasskamp, Kristian Handberg, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Susanne König, Vesna Madžoski, Nina Möntmann, Philipp Oswalt, Dorothee Richter, Elpida Rikou & Eleana Yalouri, Nora Sternfeld.
Edited by Nanne Burmann and Dorothee Richter
Publisher OnCurating.org, Zürich, June 2017
Open access
171 pages
Kim West: The Exhibitionary Complex: Exhibition, Apparatus and Media from Kulturhuset to the Centre Pompidou, 1963-1977 (2017)
Filed under thesis | Tags: · aesthetics, apparatus, art history, exhibition, information, media, museum, networks, theory
This doctoral thesis “studies the new Information Center model of the art museum that was developed by a group of artists, curators, architects, and activists connected to Moderna Museet in Stockholm between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Through close readings of Moderna Museet’s unrealized Kulturhuset project, and a series of related attempts at rethinking the exhibition and the museum in relation to new information technologies, systems, and networks, it traces the origins, the critical implications, and the effects of this model, according to which the museum should function at once as a catalyst for the active forces in society, a vast experimental laboratory, and a broadcasting station.
In this study, the museum is understood as an exhibitionary apparatus, the specific characteristics of which are configured in relation to other apparatuses for display, distribution, and interaction, which together form an exhibitionary complex, caught in a process of gradual integration with the expanding network of cybernetic media. The study asks under what conditions the exhibitionary apparatus might preserve its particular modes of social and aesthetic experience, while acting as a transformative force on and through the new information environments.”
PhD dissertation in Aesthetics, School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University
Publisher Södertörn University, Stockholm, 2017
Open access
ISBN 9789187843761
359 pages
Review: Anders Kreuger (Kunstkritikk, 2017).
Comment (0)Diener & Diener (eds.): Common Pavilions (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, exhibition, history of architecture
A collection of essays and podcasts by 33 authors on the 29 national pavilions, the setting for both the Art Biennale and the Architecture Biennale in Venice.
“The essays written by architects, historians of art and architecture, artists, and philosophers, discuss the identity of the architecture and its perception in this unique public space. The authors either outline the premises and concepts that underpin the pavilions’ form to develop a loose history of ideas; discuss the ways the pavilions have been outfitted over time; or else talk about their own personal engagement with the architecture. Written in the respective national languages of the pavilions, the essays have been translated for the podcast into English and recorded by actors and presenters.”
Created for an installation for the 13th Architecture Biennale in Venice 2012 by Diener & Diener Architects, Basel.
Photographs by Gabriele Basilico.
Also published as a book by Scheidegger & Spiess, Zürich, 2013
ISBN 9783858817341
288 pages