Journal of Curatorial Studies - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2014

Like other postproduction work by contemporary artists and purveyors of popular culture, the videos of artist, musician and composer Christian Marclay use accumulations of cultural data extracted from thousands of films (and television shows) as raw material for the diegesis. What sets Marclay’s installation The Clock (2010) apart from other installations and films in this category is the interrelationship established between its postproduction aesthetic and its specific display conditions. By matching on-screen time with actual time in a carefully designed exhibition context, The Clock simultaneously reifies the psychosomatic transformation of the moviegoer identified by Roland Barthes and dismantles the hermetic nature of the cinematic apparatus. In so doing, Marclay mobilizes latent aspects of video installation to produce new phenomenological experiences and reorganize the relationship between aesthetics and everyday life.

This article aims to demonstrate how the exhibition form and content created a powerful dialectic in the Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions (Berlin, 1931). Interactive display techniques designed by Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius supported messages advocating the crucial societal and economic role played by construction-sector labour unions. Designed to promote the system of free trade unions in Germany, the show demonstrated the potential effectiveness of photography as an integral part of a didactic system, choreographed into various displays that combined images with dynamic graphics and informative texts. To foster interest in the material, the artists used audience-involving strategies including startling viewpoints, photo-strips mounted on moving laths, and touch stations that would beckon the viewer. Taken together, the techniques constituted one of the boldest inter-war attempts to stimulate viewers through multi-sensory empowerment, and incite collective awareness at a time of immense political stakes.

The Huron-Wendat Museum in Wendake, Quebec is an example of a new form of cultural institution: museums/cultural centres founded by North American Indigenous nations. This article explores the history of Wendat traditions and concepts of culture keeping, preservation of heritage material, and the transmission of knowledge, which continue today in the contemporary practices of the Huron-Wendat Museum. The study foregrounds the Wendat origin of customs that translate into western curatorial understandings of collection and exhibition, yet remain embedded in Wendat values and worldview.

In 1943 Kenneth C. Murray conducted a survey of antiquities in British Nigeria, leading to the founding of the Department of Antiquities, which wrote antiquities legislation, regulated archaeological excavations, and established all of the museums in the country. Looking to British institutions, such as the British and the Pitt Rivers Museums, Nigeria’s institutions and display practices reveal the way in which the colonial government intended to use the museum to unite a diverse population and create the modern colonial African subject. This article examines the processes by which European museum standards were translated to colonial-era African museums and how early Nigerian museums were both an extension of and departure from the way British museums were used for social and political purposes.

Departing from the proposal by curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev to ‘see from the point of view of the meteorite’ at dOCUMENTA (13), this article analyzes the exhibition’s claim to non-anthropocentric knowledge production through the paradoxical staging of a form that re-prioritizes human experience. It focuses on two works: Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled (2012), which coalesces an affect of indifference to the centrality of human experience; and Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolas Goldberg’s El Chaco (2012), which sets inexperiencable timescales under contemporary exhibition conditions. Both works open political questions through complicity with material processes. At the same time, they point to potentials and limitations for the methodology of the ‘alreadymade’, understood here in terms of the staging of non-human timescales for human participants, and the making affordable of systemic threat.

GLAM! THE PERFORMANCE OF STYLE Curated by Darren Pih, exhibited at Tate Liverpool, 8 February–12 May 2013, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 14 June–22 September 2013, and Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, 19 October 2013–2 February 2014.

DAVID TOMAS, CONSIGNED FOR AUCTION Artexte, Montreal, 7 September–26 October 2013; 31 October 2013–11 January 2014

55th VENICE BIENNALE Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, curated by Massimiliano Gioni, along with 88 national pavilions and 47 collateral exhibitions, Venice, 1 June–24 November 2013

ART ON THE UNDERGROUND: CONTEMPORARY ART PROGRAMME ON THE TUBE 15 for 150 and other site-specific projects, various curators led by director Tamsin Dillon, locations throughout the London Underground, June 2013 – ongoing

YANG FUDONG, NEW WOMEN Curated by Noah Cowan and Davide Quadrio, commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival as part of A Century of Chinese Cinema, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Toronto, 7 June – 11 August 2013

DAVID BOWIE IS Curated by Geoffrey Marsh and Victoria Broackes, organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 23 March – 11 August 2013. Travelling to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 25 September – 27 November 2013, and other locations.

ARTE DE CONTRADICCIONES. POP, REALISMOS Y POLÍTICA. BRASIL-ARGENTINA 1960 Curated by Rodrigo Alonso and Paulo Herkenhoff, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, 14 July – 16 September 2012

THE LIBRARY BY SOUNDPOCKET Curated by soundpocket, http://www.thelibrarybysoundpocket.org.hk, 2013–date

MUSEUMS AND COMMUNITIES: CURATORS, COLLECTIONS AND COLLABORATION, VIV GOLDING AND WAYNE MODEST (EDS) New York: Bloomsbury (2013), 288 pp., Paperback, ISBN 978-0-85785-131-4, US$34.95

BAD BOY: MY LIFE ON AND OFF THE CANVAS, ERIC FISCHL AND MICHAEL STONE New York: Crown Publishers (2012), 368 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-770-43557-8, US$31.00

MAKING ART GLOBAL (PART 1): THE THIRD HAVANA BIENNIAL 1989, RACHEL WEISS (ED.) London: Afterall Books (2011), 256 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-84638-081-5, £14.95