Exhibition Design and the Relationship With the Spectator

2014

This course explores a range of museological and popular cultural exhibition practices through case studies including fine arts, ethnography, (natural) history, science and technology, national, memorial and children's museums. Throughout the semester we will focus on investigating how contemporary (primarily American) museums and heritage sites have evolved from princely collections, curiosity cabinets, circuses and amusement parks. The overarching theme of the course is to trace the development of modern museological practice in relation to economic, social, technological, scientific, cultural and political changes and how these transformations affected various "cultures of display." Studying the metamorphosis of museums necessarily entails discussion of empowered public audiences, invention and discovery, education as a means to train citizens in morality and the importance of solidifying national, regional, local as well as class and ethno-cultural identities. The growth of commerce and trade in the aftermath of the first and second industrial evolutions in conjunction with widespread European colonialism resulted in new models and venues for the exhibition of new technologies, art, architecture, anthropology, history as well as living and dead human and animal remains. During the course of the semester, we will look at objects, buildings, people, animals and landscapes to think about how their contexts of display have told three-dimensional stories over the course of several centuries, drawing mainly on examples in the United States. We will examine issues such as the relationship of collections and landscapes to identity; the intersection of commerce and culture; and the influence that evolving educational and entertainment practices have had upon museological institutions. We will consider the role of museums and exhibitions in preserving a view of the past and developing an image of progress; and we will discuss how they change in response to the various contexts in which and for which they exist. The basic objectives of this course are: • To become familiar with the origins of the modern museum, from early collecting activities to the development of the museum in the 19th and 20th centuries and into the postmodern present • To explore the relationships between museums and evolutionary theory, ethnology/ethnography, anthropological theories of cultural relativism, archaeology, natural history • To investigate the cultural and political contexts of building ethnographic collections and displays; as well as the relationship between museums and imperialist/colonialist plunder • Analyzing the emergence of the museum as a focus of anthropological and theoretical inquiry and as a subject of ethnography itself • Examining the contemporary role(s) of museums, notably as the museum has become part of the culture industry (e.g., blockbuster exhibitions); political reassessments of museums' "use" and marketing in

Curatography, 2023

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.

Our presentation will treat a particular class of "spaces of exhibition." Briefly stated, these spaces were temporary exhibitions; art, architecture, urbanism, or design were their content; they were installed in museums in North America; their designers were architects, and they date to the period after 1976. We chose the topic because architects over the past twenty-year period have made important contributions to the history of display and interpretation, and also to the creation of new cognitive and experiential realms in the museum. In these exhibitions, architects collaborated in the project of historical representation, generating evocative spaces that mediate between objects and beholders, and between reality and abstraction. We will show many images, because the exhibitions were ephemeral and, unfortunately, rarely published as built works.

Design is an exploration of the complex dynamic between design, culture, and the system of representation -exhibition. This literature review, as part of a master's thesis research in progress, stems from recognizing the fact that museum exhibition techniques communicate visually and through other senses, the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of an exhibition's development process, and the current trend of audience interactivity through technology and other media in museum exhibitions to engage with the viewer and promote learning.

in C. Ricci (ed.) Starting from Venice. Studies on the Biennale, Et. al. Edizioni, Milan, 2010

Atatürk Üniversitesi, Güzel Sanatlar Enstitüsü Dergisi, 2021

The display has been used from the very beginning to display objects. Exhibition design is a combination of display and contemporary visual communication design. With the development of the exhibition concept and the increase in interdisciplinary cooperation, communication is established by including the space itself in the design. Today, the exhibited products are no longer exhibited, the exhibition itself has become a work of art and the exhibition design has begun to be designed consciously. This change causes you to question what art is and what design is. Within the scope of this research, a descriptive study was conducted to improve the interior design performance in the context of the space requirements of the exhibition space. As a method, in the first stage, an international literature review was conducted using the keyword "exhibition design". In the next step, based on the data obtained, it has been tried to reveal how experience and interaction in exhibition design can produce original results, with examples limited to photography studies and metal/glass works to evaluate works in various dimensions. Thanks to this research, comparisons were made to improve the design performance of the exhibition space, which designers can use as input in the design process. Reproduction of such works will greatly improve the artist's performance in exhibition design and ensure the up-to-date continuity of knowledge and experience sharing in future designs.

2015

Introduction Literary critics write book reviews about new novels. Art critics review works of art and the exhibitions they are presented in. Exhibition critiques, however, seem to be much less developed. 1 In most popular reviews, most attention is usually paid to the shape, architecture and function of the building, rather than to the actual contents of the exhibition (a notable example being the reviews on the new Dutch Military Museum 2 ). In other instances, reviews are echoes of the press releases of the organising institutions, or evaluations of the accompanying marketing message. If they do go beyond that, they tend rely on specific disciplines such as art history. One might expect academic reviews to provide some much needed in-depth criticism. However, museums and exhibitions rarely receive substantial coverage in academic journals. Although we do find theoretical reflection on museum exhibitions, especially in the case of ethnographic museums and exhibitions, it often sto...

Journal of Curatorial Studies, 2013

Changing demands of society and the art market have directly shaped exhibition space over the years, leading to its contemporary formal 'crisis': the 'white box' vs. 'building as object,' a rigid dichotomy that poses either the sacrifice of architecture or art at the expense of the other. This essay has found that contemporary trends in the art market have brought about the emergence of several new exhibition strategies, and seeks to evaluate these strategies as a means to move beyond the contemporary 'crisis' of exhibition space. This essay defines exhibition space as the physical setting of a public display of art work, including museums, galleries, fairs, and emerging typologies. The essay will focus on typology as opposed to detail, for the sake of eliciting the most meaningful relationships between exhibition space and the art market. These typologies will be referred to collectively as “exhibition space” throughout the essay, specifying between them only when necessary (the term gallery is often used interchangeably for galleries and museums). This is to promote a cross-sectional analysis of typologies in order to elicit commonalities, and because the developments of these typologies have great overlap. This essay is structured by three main sections: The Historical Development of Exhibition Spaces, Contemporary Exhibition Spaces, and The Future of Exhibition Spaces.

It has become increasingly common to claim that the history of modern and contemporary art is best grasped as a history of exhibitions. While such an approach has obvious advantages, particularly for curators, its implications are less clear. How might it differ from accounts that privilege artists, movements, mediums, or contexts? What sort of critical, aesthetic, and analytical criteria should structure such an undertaking? How can a history of exhibitions avoid the pitfalls of canonization? And what relevance might pre-existing models of curating retain for contemporary practices? This seminar will investigate such questions by collectively analyzing a selection of test cases drawn from the history of exhibition-making. Our work will be directed by the following objectives: to trace important developments in the evolution of exhibition forms and curatorial practices; to register the ways in which these histories have conditioned recent artistic production and exhibition making; and to critically assess the rhetoric of the art exhibition as a form of public communication. The course is divided into three sections. The first of these, entitled “Models,” surveys important moments in the development of the exhibition in Western modernity, ranging from the private collection, the state museum, and the salon to the modernist musem, the travelling exhibition, and the international biennial; it also attends to avant-garde activities in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The second section, “Countermodels,” seeks to trace some of the many ways in which experimental art and exhibition-making positioned itself against these historical precedents in the decades following 1945. While this section will cover such influential museum exhibitions as “Information” and “When Attitudes Become Form,” it will place equal emphasis on gallery shows, demonstrations, para-museal installations, and work in distributed media. It will further examine developments at the periphery of established North Atlantic centers. The last section, “Altermodels,” engages contemporary developments that mean to further reinvent the exhibition. Here we will look closely at the complex transformations grouped together under the term “globalization,” before examining recent tendencies in durational and social production, closing with an evaluation of the changing status of curatorial labor.