Exhibiting

Lia Carreira

In the last two decades, we have seen a surge of artistic labs dedicated to the making of exhibitions, or exhibiting. Yet, exhibiting has always been a somewhat complex term in the field. It is often linked to, or sometimes even applied as a synonym of, displaying and presenting. Exhibiting is generally understood as the gesture of setting something visible, by showing, and, as such, presupposes that there will be a reciprocal moment of viewing. Moreover, it stands as a technique that inevitably carries within itself the possibility of disclosing—since showing something, through means of selecting, also implies not showing others. Recently, exhibiting has been articulated in comparison to curating and to the larger notions of “the curatorial.” This is part of an attempt to differentiate the single act of presenting objects within a space from the combined and multifaceted work embedded in the overall process of exhibition-making, which, alongside exhibiting, includes researching, selecting, and arranging, often accompanied by writing, mediating, or interfacing with public, artists, and institutions.1

Among the labs for exhibition-making are a series of exhibition laboratories in academic institutions such as the Laboratório de Curadoria at the Coimbra University and the CuratorLab of the Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. These labs function as learning-by-doing environments where students and researchers are able to explore, question, and expand different methods of exhibiting. As such, exhibiting can be extended to include techniques of investigating and experimenting. Established in 2012, the Exhibition Research Lab at the Liverpool John Moores University, for example, sets itself as a space where “experimental thinking and making can take place and where curatorial knowledge is enacted, produced, and made public.”2 Joasia Krysa, who has been running the lab since its conception, draws from Bruno Latour the idea that science and technology must be studied “in action” or “in the making,” shifting traditional conceptions of exhibitions as “object-making” activities to a more dynamic process of experimenting and disseminating “curatorial thinking in non-propositional forms.”3 Other projects such as Beta_space (2004) at the Creativity and Cognition Studios of the University of Technology in Sydney developed a form of “living laboratory” where visitors’ interactions are monitored and their data collected and analyzed. Beta_space aimed to address both “the needs of artists to engage audiences, in context, in their practice, and the needs of the museum to provide current and dynamic content to their audiences in the rapidly changing field of information technology.”4 Exhibiting here includes prototyping and testing, becoming an adaptive tool addressing new technological developments in the exhibition space.

As Paul Basu and Sharon Macdonald have previously pointed out, the realm of exhibitions is not so different from that of experiments. As the authors put it: if the main purpose of the scientific experiment is to “make visible the invisible” as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer suggest5, then experimenting can also involve a form of exhibiting.6 In this context, Basu and Macdonald see Robert Hooke as the Royal Society’s first “curator of experiments,” and the Ashmolean in Oxford, considered the first university museum, as an exhibition space for public demonstrations of scientific experiments.7

It has been also suggested that hybrid spaces for experimental demonstration and artistic presentation existed in the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, as reigning powers sought modes of “representation of truth” within the natural sciences, towards the reconstruction of a “natural social order.”8 Exhibiting stood for both exposing and enacting, in which scientific and cultural spaces strived for the popularization of knowledge of an ascending “enlightened” mass. Here was not only a literal stage for experimentation, where one could perform or be exposed to scientific knowledge, but other forms of exposition were conducted, through reports and other publications.9 Exposition, moreover, and especially in Latin languages, can stand as both an art exhibition and the act of denouncing a wrongdoing or of revealing matters of fact, where the “exhibit,” in both cases, acts as an object of evidence for the viewing and judgment of others. Exhibiting as exposing then alludes to its role in the condemnation of the guilty and the absolving of the innocent and has its equal relevance within Forensics.

Exhibiting as a technique of exposing and disseminating knowledge (but also forms of conduct) also stood as a mode of “civic management”—a form of governance that gave the nineteenth-century museum in particular a prominent role towards social order.10 As Tony Bennett argues, the modern museum became an “institution of exhibition” that, together with libraries, natural science museums, panoramas, arcades and department stores, were involved in the displacement of objects and bodies from previously exclusive enclosed settings (such as the studiolo and the cabinet of curiosities) to more open and public spheres of representation, forming an “exhibitionary complex” for the “inscription and broadcasting of power.”11 In this complex, exhibiting becomes a means of “interiorizing” the public’s gaze towards “self-surveillance and self-regulation” through “commanding and arranging” objects and bodies in and for public display.12 Here, that which is shown and observed fluctuates between objects in display and visitors’ civic behavior.

Exhibiting, as part of the toolbox of lab techniques, can then stand for a series of complex relations, shifting as it is constantly re-situated. In its relation to curating, exhibiting describes a technique that highlights ingrained disputes (of roles and of discourses). In its relationship to experiments, it highlights, among other things, the processual and performative traits embedded within knowledge-making and sharing. In its constant displacement, from setting to setting, exhibiting acts within different regimes of visuality and visibility, constantly shifting what and whom can be shown or seen interchangeably. And today, situated within exhibition labs, it becomes a critical tool that both informs and readjusts a practice constantly in the making.

Lia Carreira is a Brazilian curatorial researcher and exhibition historian based in Portugal. She is currently a post-graduate researcher at the Winchester School of Art of the University of Southampton (UK) where she develops an investigation on the ‘Exhibition as a Laboratory’ motto in the Arts.