Reformulating the Architecture of Exhibitions (original) (raw)

And so, I was trying to ask the question again, ask it anew, as if it had not been asked before, because the language of the historian was not telling me what I needed to know…-HORTENSE SPILLERS The more possibilities are suggested, the more possibilities exist, the more possibilities are taken in by the imagination, the more the imagination's possibilities are defined, the more the possibility of more possibilities can be recognised. The possibilities of more possibilities lead to the imagination itself, immediately and to me.-Madeline Gins If you have curatorial experiences, you might be familiar with the moment when something happens in the realm of an exhibition-the moment the exhibition transcends to become more than just the sum of individual art works in a specific space or site. Exhibiting is alchemy. Alchemy of all sorts of consciousness and entities-invisible histories, memories and projections into the future that curators, artists, technicians, installers and the beholders bring in; matters, objects, both animate and inanimate; knowledge, space and environment etc.-which dissolve their boundaries and synchronise to become inseparable and indistinguishable as individual beings. In this sense, the exhibition itself is not simply exteriorised memory or experience, or a collection of art works and their contextualisation, but also a specific attentional form, into which social, psychic, collective, and technological instances of un/consciousness are capacitated and merged.