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- Volume 11, Issue 2, 2022
Journal of Curatorial Studies - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2022
Volume 11, Issue 2, 2022
- Articles
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Iris Clert’s Modern Matronage
More LessThe legacy of Iris Clert (1918–86), whose eponymous gallery was central to the emergence of the avant-garde in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, has often been framed as a story of vanity, spectacle and self-promotion. Considering Clert’s unconventional approach to running her gallery in the context of postwar expectations of women’s behaviour, the article recasts Clert as a model of modern matronage and situates Clert within a history of women who have used arts leadership to assert individuality and influence culture. In Clert’s case, this meant applying traditionally ‘feminine’ domestic skills to her public work, in order to upend gallery conventions and reshape the culture of the avant-garde.
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The Reconstruction of the Crystal Easels at the São Paulo Museum of Art and the Canonization of a Decolonial Expography
More LessIn 2015, the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) opened the exhibition Picture Gallery in Transformation using the exhibit display format designed by the museum’s architect, the Italo-Brazilian Lina Bo Bardi. The crystal easels, as they became known, were conceived to converse with the building’s architecture, yet had disappeared from the museum’s second floor for almost two decades, replaced by traditional hanging methods. The purpose of this article is to examine the various reasons behind the removal of Bo Bardi’s expography and the controversies that have contributed to a new valuation of the crystal easels. Through an analysis of the reconstruction of MASP’s permanent collection, the technical and conceptual changes that guided it, and the curatorial discourses that reconstituted its permanent displays, I argue that the characteristics of Bo Bardi’s easels contribute to the decolonial programme of the new MASP management.
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Focalization and Embodied Viewing Experience in Exhibition Narrative: Asia > Amsterdam at the Rijksmuseum
By Pao-Yi YangThis article shows the importance of focalization in understanding potential ideological undertones and subjective interpretations of museum exhibitions. Focalization is conceived here as both a narrative device that denotes the perspectival filtration of a museum presentation and an analytical tool that can explicate the potential ideologies behind an exhibition. To illustrate facets of focalization often manifested in the interplay between exhibition designs and viewing experiences, I provide a close reading of the arrangement in Asia >Amsterdam (2015), a temporary exhibition on cultural contact hosted by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Drawing on cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s conception of focalization, I call attention to an instance of internal focalization in a gallery that juxtaposed Chinese porcelain of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) with seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes. This juxtaposition, along with the specific visual order of the showpieces, promoted an embodied spectatorship that is filtered by the subjective sensory impressions of the Dutch artists: a viewing experience that drew audiences into seeing the visual and material qualities of Ming porcelain as if through the eyes of Golden Age Dutch artists. In this way, the lens of focalization also offered a framework for examining the exhibition’s subtext regarding the Dutch domestication of Asian goods.
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- Curatorial Reflection
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Slo Curating: Restitution, Archives, Access and Care
More LessThis article elaborates a theory of slo curating as a durational practice and methodology. It interrogates concepts such as provenance, chain of relation, collections and conservation that it establishes are part of a colonial episteme undergirding the museum and its exhibitionary practices. Starting from recent digitization projects of museum collections, I analyse artist-led curatorial projects, legal cases and requests for restitution by colonized and Indigenous peoples across the world that challenge long-standing imperial concepts that inform museum studies. Projects by the Rapa Nui, Iqbal Geoffrey, Julie Tolentino, Constantina Zavitsanos and سراب/Saraab (Shahana Rajani and Omer Wasim) are discussed alongside El Paquete Semanal (2008–ongoing) and Exhibition Without Objects (2012–ongoing), foregrounding their alternative theoretical approaches to archives, access, labour, temporality and borders. Slo curating offers a set of curatorial practices and methods that are at the service of people instead of institutions.
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- Exhibition Reviews
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- Book Reviews
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Contemporary Art and Feminism, Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore
More LessReview of: Contemporary Art and Feminism, Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore
London and New York: Routledge (2021), 270 pp., p/bk,
ISBN: 978-1-00040-429-6, US $44.95
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Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum, Katrin Sieg
More LessReview of: Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum, Katrin Sieg
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (2021), 316 pp., p/bk,
ISBN: 978-0-47205-510-4, US $34.95
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Okwui Enwezor: The Art of Curating, Jane Chin Davidson and Alpesh Kantilal Patel (eds)
More LessReview of: Okwui Enwezor: The Art of Curating, Jane Chin Davidson and Alpesh Kantilal Patel (eds)
Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 48, May 2021, 152 pp.,
ISSN: 1478-0211-60, $27.00 USD
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Staging Art and Chineseness: The Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions, Jane Chin Davidson
More LessReview of: Staging Art and Chineseness: The Politics of Trans/Nationalism and Global Expositions, Jane Chin Davidson
Manchester: University of Manchester Press (2020), 224 pp, h/bk,
ISBN: 978-1-5261-3978-8, $120 US
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