Curatorial Strategies Research Articles

Heritagization of religious sites: in search of visitor agency and the dialectics underlying heritage planning assemblages

ABSTRACT The heritagization of religious sites has been increasingly studied in recent decades, with the focus shifting from the impact of mass tourism to considering the appropriation and commodification of religious sites as processes characterised by institutional dynamics and conflicting values. Drawing on an integrative-synthetic review as its methodological backbone, through critical heritage theory, advocating an epistemological turn towards post-secular strategies, this conceptual paper explores how the complex relationship between heritage, religion and tourism has been discussed and problematised by a growing literature addressing the heritagization of religious sites. Findings show that previous work has been limited to examining issues of commodification and living religion highlighting a hybrid sacred/secular space, while few researchers have addressed issues of conservation and authenticity. This is evident in the lack of qualitative studies examining the impact of gentrification, restoration and curatorial strategies in the way religious sites are experienced. Thus, the agency of visitors to construct alternative narratives is concealed, while there remains uncertainty regarding the multiplicity of institutional mechanisms influencing conservation assemblages. The paper concludes that research needs to further engage with the dialectics that underpin religious heritage planning assemblages and critically examine the epistemological assumptions under which religious heritage consumption have been considered.

An art museum in every mall? Persuasive spaces for contemporary art in China

ABSTRACT This paper offers a critical consideration of the proliferation of art museums situated in shopping malls in China. Creating interventions of art and the art museum within retail structures can be conceptually understood as a synthesis development model, whereby the combination of art and commerce is adopted by real estate enterprises in China. The operational characteristics of mall museums reflect a growing tendency for art to be used instrumentally to align with everyday life: an aestheticisation of the ordinary. In the late twentieth century, postmodernism placed great emphasis on the blurring of boundaries between art and everyday life, signalling the collapse of the distinction between high art and mass/popular culture [Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotext; Featherstone, Mike. 1990. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 64–80. London: SAGE Publications]. Nonetheless, through the example of the Chi Shanghai K11 Art Mall, this paper considers public engagement practices where ‘art is for the masses’ within such structures to explore whether curatorial strategies and art practices are influenced through a constant adaptation into ‘art museum retail’. It also aims to consider whether the development of these ‘persuasive spaces’ thus has the potential to include experimentation and knowledge production.

Exhibiting Know-How: Curatorial Strategies for the Display of Artisanal Technical Gestures

The exhibition of know-how and artisanal technical gestures has become a concern for many contemporary museums and artistic institutions. The following analysis of the ethnography-based curatorial project Les Meilleurs Ouvriers de France at the Musée des Arts et Métiers, the group show The Mind Begins and Ends in the Fingertips at Palais de Tokyo, and the two-fold exhibition The Beauty of the Gesture at the City of Ceramics in Sèvres will shed light on the possibilities and pitfalls of displaying know-how and tacit skills. These exhibitions took place in different institutional settings – a technical museum, a contemporary art site, and a museum associated with a porcelain manufactory. The spatial and temporal convergence of these exhibitions related to modern and contemporary crafts in France between 2017 and 2020 will allow us to observe the unfolding of different curatorial strategies. These exhibitions will be explored through several lines of reflection: the recovery of certain curatorial traditions, the presence of the working hand as a curatorial motif, the dialectic between showing and concealing and, finally, some reflections on the role of the museum in identifying and preserving gestural knowledge.

Local Interferences

Building on D.J. Hopkins’s ‘counter-textual dramaturgy’ and using as principal example the curatorial strategy of the 2018 Palermo edition of the arts biennial Manifesta, both of which introduced urban study research strategies proposed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, this essay discusses the strategy of dramaturgic mapping as a way of generating ‘resonant interference’, as I call it drawing on a concept by German sociologist Hartmut Rosa. I argue that mapping fosters attention for common, resonant micro-narratives whose productive interferences help to dramaturgically embed art works within contemporary plural and diverse local cultural contexts.

Regimes of representation in Canadian police museums: Othering, police subjectivities, and gunscapes

There are dozens of public police museums located across Canada that memorialize the country’s history of law enforcement and criminalization. Drawing from fieldwork at these sites, we explore the representational devices used to curate police museum displays. Invoking Stuart Hall’s work on representation and Othering, we examine how gun displays at Canadian police museums are organized to minimize the harm that police interventions with guns cause. Arguing these displays are made intelligible through a regime of representation that naturalizes the distinction between police officers and the “criminal” Other, we examine how these museums position weaponry including the gun as an esthetic object and a force of social good when in the hands of police. Analyzing curatorial strategies such as the arrangement of weapons, mannequin placement, dress, and level of humanization, as well as the rhetoric and narratives espoused on accompanying placards, we show how the curatorial approach in these spaces ratify an ideological framework that normalizes police violence and criminalization. We then assess what our analysis contributes to literatures on police museums and policing myths.

Curating Online Collections: Towards an Authentically Digital, Mediation Protocol for Art Digitizations

Since the mid-1990s, cultural organizations have increasingly digitized their physical collections and made them available online; however, museums are still puzzled over what to do with these growing digital collections. Meanwhile, art institutions’ reluctance to produce virtual exhibitions, linked to a prevailing skeuomorphic paradigm, has left the matter of curating art digitizations unresolved. While museum computing scholarship has aptly identified the problematic absence of authentically digital curatorial processes, it has largely overlooked the fact that online collections and in-gallery group shows similarly condition artistic reception owing to a shared database logic, subjecting both to a mediation paradox in contemporary culture. This article examines the effects of this shared logic on public engagement, along with recent digital curatorial strategies that have emerged in response around notions of the digital aura and networked objects. The article concludes by proposing three conditions for an alternative curatorial process capable of adequately mediating art digitizations online without sacrificing aesthetic experience to the limited affordances of screen-based information and communications technologies.

Seeking the Sound: Sound-Based Interpretive Approaches in Exhibitions of Sound-Producing Objects

Sound-producing objects, such as musical instruments and sound devices, are a distinct category of museum objects because their museification has deprived them of their primary characteristic: sound. This paper discusses the use of sound as an interpretive tool in exhibitions of sound-producing objects. After reviewing the use of sound as an interpretive medium in contemporary museum exhibitions, the discussion focuses on sound-producing objects and analyses the concerns about their functionality in the museum context. The last section of the paper introduces sonic references, a specific type of sonic practices integrated in contemporary museum exhibitions. The documentation of the interpretive approaches adopted towards sound-producing objects aims to explore the potential of sound in creating meaningful experiences for museum visitors. Finally, the paper seeks to encourage sound-led curatorial strategies that explore more experiential ways to engage visitors with museum exhibitions.

Constructing art history: Contemporary curatorial strategies in studying symbolism of the Baltic states

The article is devoted to the analysis of curatorial strategies used in the international exhibition «Wild Souls. Symbolism in the Baltic States», successfully implemented under the supervision of Rodolphe Rapetti in 2018–2021 in Paris, Tallinn, Vilnus and Riga. Revealing the originality of the curatorial narrative contributes to the identification of current research directions in the study of the Baltic countries visual culture of the 19th–20th centuries. The implemented project has the potential for further revision of generally accepted ideas about the genesis and development of the symbolist art in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This also contributes to the formation and widespread dissemination of methodological approaches that have not been previously used in the art studies of these countries. To understand the novelty of the chosen strategies, historiographical analysis of art in the Baltic countries from the 1940s to the 1980s is carried out. The third conference of art historians of the Baltic republics in 1990 was called a turning point in the history of cultural studies. It is at this scientific event that Boris Bershtein calls for a metaposition and the usage of metalanguage in the construction of an «internal» description of national culture. According to the author of this article, an exhibition «Wild Souls» is intended to become such a metaposition, capable of summarizing the already accumulated knowledge and offering a new look at the development of visual culture. Using universal approaches to the study of symbolism, Rodolphe Rapetti, together with colleagues from Baltic museums, demonstrates the trans-regional community of artistic phenomena that took place in these countries, and also convincingly proves the involvement of the Baltic artists in the general European artistic process at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Inventing the National: The Art of Estonia in the 1880s-2000s

In the article, the author analyzes the visual strategies of the representation of the concept of «national» in the art of Estonia in the late XIXth-early XXIst century. Analyzing the socio-cultural discourses in Estonian art, the author comes to the conclusion that the initial «identity crisis» of Estonians associated with the Baltic-Scandinavian, Baltic-German and Soviet periods formed the basis of artistic strategies and practices of all Estonian art. Attempts to identify specifically Estonian features in art and culture led to the fact that artists rejected part of the historical and cultural experience of the nation: for example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, «Young Estonia» («Noor Eesti») rejected the line of «national romanticism» by Kristjan Raud, and in the 1990s, young artists (Liina Siib and Mare Tralla) denied the Soviet past, creating ironic, repulsive works on this topic. This has led to the fact that over the past twenty years, museum and curatorial strategies in the Baltic States have been aimed at actively searching for their own identity and national and ethnic identity. However, the ambivalence of the perception of the «national» is also reflected in the exhibitions of modern Estonia: asking a question about the purely «national» in Estonian art, curators get into a certain theoretical and visual dead end, since it is impossible to separate Estonian art of any period from foreign and Soviet discourses. As a result, it is difficult to identify the «specifically Estonian», «Baltic» cultural identity, that is, the national characteristics of visual images. In this regard, the concept of the so-called «national» is still acute in contemporary art in Estonia.

Refusal as Repair

This article examines the relationship between art and crisis through a personal account of the Disorganising project initiated by West Space, Liquid Architecture, and Bus Projects in 2020. The article was written alongside the final stage of the Disorganising project, which coincided with the lifting of Melbourne’s sixth and final lockdown and the “opening up” of Australia’s states and territories. Drawing from the lived experience of the author, the opening section, “Living from Work,” explores the experience of Disorganising during the pandemic. “Repair” situates Disorganising within a contradictory climate of crisis that tasks artists with economic recovery, and considers its possibilities as a reparative curatorial strategy. “Refuse” looks at examples that counter these expectations of recovery through the different modes of refusal practiced in Disorganising, including the refusal of productivity and competition; existing in contradiction; taking pause; exceeding timelines; being in duration; and working through the mess. The final section, “Return,” considers what might happen next. By way of conclusion, this article considers “How to End Disorganising?” It reflects on the contradictions of the project and asks how one might evaluate projects of this nature.

Sur Gallery

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

An Auto-Ethnographic Entrée en Matière and Mise en Contexte

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Colonial Art from Spanish America in Québec

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Artistic Responses to Coloniality in the Americas

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Arts from Latin America at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Introduction to the Dialogues on Latin American Art(ists) from/in Canada

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Encounters with “Latin American Art” in Canada

This Dialogues section seeks to contribute to the scholarship on Latin American art in Canada and “Latinx Canadian art.” We aim to broaden the historical and current narratives of art and artists from Latin America north of the United States, taking into account Canada’s history of migration and its official bilingual status (French-English), multilingual and multicultural reality, and relationship with Indigenous peoples. Adding to the urgency of studying the presence of Latin American art in Canada, there is also a need to focus on the work of artists and curators with a Latin American background. They are developing languages of expression, practices, and aesthetics that no longer conform to the “Latin American art” category. It is thus essential to highlight the multiple artistic initiatives that are allowing them to gain visibility and recognition within both the local and global artistic milieus. We posit that today it is almost impossible to overlook both the historical and the ongoing presence of Latin American art and artists in Canada and the recent emergence of a vibrant, ever-expanding contemporary Latinx Canadian art scene. This section proposes six groundbreaking contributions that, from coast to coast, offer further data and analysis, case studies, and investigations into museum archives: from Vancouver to Montréal, from pre-Columbian art and material culture to contemporary art, from the Chilean diaspora of the 1970s to more recent migration waves, from curatorial strategies to the classroom.

Artificial Landscape: in search of publicness through urban spectacle in Hong Kong

Screen technologies increasingly permeate the experience of public space in Hong Kong. Large media walls have occupied the façades of many buildings, rendering a cityscape with dynamic information visible as a new urban skin. This article is a case study on Artificial Landscape, a site-specific media art project located on Asia Pacific’s largest LED outdoor screen. The case sets an example of how a public screen can serve as a mediating agent. It provides an opportunity for artists to provoke absent ideas in the public space and explore subversive potential, including critical reflection on issues surrounding surveillance, consumerism and rapid urban growth. The case also exemplifies how a public screen can mediate the public to experience an alternative context through artistic intervention, where negotiations of perceptions and subjectivities are made possible. This article provides insights into a public screen’s mode of spectatorship, quality of public space and curatorial strategies in an urban context. This is achieved by illustrating how various artworks extend the notion of publicness and remediate the mutually constitutive relationship among the built environment, media technologies, artists, public and everyday encounters.

(Dis)play: Paper Showrooms of Soviet Labor

This article analyzes how the avant‐garde display techniques of the early Soviet period were remediated into the book format to transform visual literacy into production skills. Illustrated children's books adopted multi‐media visual techniques originally found in exhibitions to transform the printed page into a dynamic tool for teaching children how to become the workers of the future. In the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet displays were unrivaled propaganda tools, capable of activating and mobilizing visitors as much as modern media such as cinema and radio. Because of their reliance on a combination of tactile, visual, auditory and physical communication strategies, exhibitions offered Soviet authors and illustrators a set of formal and narrative strategies that responded to new theories of child‐reader perception in the field of Soviet pedagogy. By analyzing the representational language of At the Exhibition against the background of El’ Lissitzky's demonstration room, I show that thematic and formal aspects of exhibition display transform the book into a visual template and a road‐map that gradually leads the reader from observing to making Soviet things. Similarly, in analyzing the role of text and image in the preschool picture book Our Review I show how curatorial strategies typical of dioramas are embedded in the book medium and transform it into an interactive display. Radically transformed into a portable diorama, the book becomes a training device directs the child‐reader to inscribe his or her actions into a system of collectively enforced social practices. Through the book‐turned‐display, Soviet children were trained into new visual practices that promised to transform them into producers, organizers and surveyors of their own culture.

Enwezor’s Model and Copenhagen’s Center for Art on Migration Politics

One of the most remarkable signs of the importance and adaptability of Okwui Enwezor’s work is the way in which the transformative models for exhibition making that he developed have found their way into small-scale institutional spaces and extra-institutional contexts. Resourceful curators across the world have successfully translated his models into critical formats and inventive ways of producing social and political knowledge, carefully adjusted to local contexts and needs. The aim of this article is to trace the influential postcolonial “platforms model” that Enwezor conceptualized for Documenta11 to a small but internationally acclaimed gallery in Copenhagen: the Center for Art on Migration Politics (CAMP). The article falls into three parts. The first part introduces CAMP and the Danish context for migration, before the authors discuss core elements of Enwezor’s exemplary transformation of curating into the creation of platforms for political interventions at his Documenta11 exhibition. The second part seeks to answer three questions: What was the curatorial strategy and multisited structure that Enwezor and his team developed? How did their decolonizing approach help create inclusive, discursive, and curatorial spaces that contested the binaristic perception of the West as the center and the non-West as periphery and offer a vision of the (art) world as profoundly entangled and plurivocal? How has the organization of Documenta11 as a globally distributed network of discursively and conceptually interconnected platforms contributed to restructuring the exhibition venue and to rethinking the interrelationship between the exhibition, as it is traditionally understood as the very core of an art event, and exhibition-related events perceived as collateral, sometimes even dispensable, activities? The third part of the article returns to CAMP to explore the specific translation of Enwezor’s legacy into a small-scale, local art space.