Exhibition / Exhibitionary
Exhibitions have changed their approach and function over time. They have not only reacted against the idea of a prescribed political or natural order of display, but they also have questioned their space as a privileged site of capitalist forms of representation.
By Multiple authors
Multiple authors • 7/1/25
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The Lexicon is an ongoing project begun by the international Curatorial Studies Workshop, which is part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN). The initial idea was to locate each member’s take on key terms often taken for granted in the curatorial field—such as curating, curatorial, exhibition, exhibitionary, representation, and so forth. We quickly discovered that as fundamental as these terms are, they didn’t carry the same meaning for each of us. The Lexicon stimulated a process of mutual understanding while forming a common ground for a cumulative, multi-perspective dialogue. It was an exercise focused not on finding the “most valid” argument, but on the cumulative—and, in a lot of ways, curatorial—juxtaposition built on the collective reflection and dialogue. For The Curatorial, we will continue to build on what we started, adding new definitions/propositions for terms over time to continue a dialogue that we hope will be beneficial and provocative for all those interested in the field and who appreciate the plasticity of meaning and experience so essential to the work we do. The Lexicon is, therefore, not intended to suggest or offer a clear and single definition for the terms proposed. Instead, it aims to generate a productive dialogue between definitions that can help map the variety of curatorial approaches, aesthetic imaginaries, and forms of practice. The Lexicon will stage this dialogue with monthly contributions from curators, artists, organizers, activists, academics, and critical thinkers.—Carolina Rito, Lexicon section editor
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Nina Liebenberg
We can define “exhibition” as an event varying in duration that is curated for an audience and includes the display of objects, text, audio-visual elements, and performances. As a format, it can function as a tool to facilitate inter/trans/cross-disciplinary engagements that promote multiple interpretations of single objects (loosening the taxonomic framework to which disciplinary objects and images are usually subjected).
In his catalogue essay for the exhibition Away from Home, held at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2003), the curator Jeffrey Kipnis calls an exhibition a “roundtrip,” positing that its basic form—home (a), away (b), back (a’)—finds its most fertile incarnation in the sonata of classical music. In a sonata, the exposition (a) introduces themes in the home key before departing. In the development (b), these themes undergo transformations across various keys, creating a sense of adventure. Key changes, or chromatic shifts, add color and render the material unfamiliar or strange. Finally, the recapitulation (a’) brings the themes back to the home key, altered yet familiar. An exhibition functions similarly. [See Jeffrey Kipnis, “Away from Home,” in Away from Home, ed. Annetta Massie (Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2003), 40–41.]
Vipash Purichanont
An exhibition is a series of objects on display. It manifests a set of relations woven together with images, signs, discourse, and power. It is something brought forth to be looked at, to be walked into, to be experienced immersively. Unlike other display technologies, such as cinema (which requires the viewer to remain still while the images move), an exhibition requires the subject to move through a series of relations. It need not be housed in a confined space, as an exhibition possesses an internal quality that draws viewers in, acts on them, and participates in shaping perception and subjectivity.
It is also temporal. Even a museum’s “permanent exhibition” must eventually be rehung or rearranged. As a form of display, an exhibition rearranges its viewers as well as its objects; the process of viewing can initiate subjectivation, potentially altering one’s worldview.
Exhibitions are physical. Yet the rise of virtual reality and the metaverse has made exhibitions in virtual space possible. A third-person view, where the user sees their own avatar from an external perspective, exemplifies an exhibition’s power: it enables both observation and the control of a subject undergoing transformation.
Bige Örer
The definition of what constitutes an exhibition and what is contained within it is evolving, with many now seen as dynamic, participatory spaces where art, knowledge, and experience are shared and produced. While traditionally curated by a small group of experts, or a single curator, recent practices have shifted toward a more inclusive, audience-centered approach driven by collaboration, community engagement ,and social participation. Typically showcased in a gallery, museum, or a similar venue, exhibitions are increasingly occupying public and digital spaces, extending their global reach. Exhibitions have the potential to enrich public life by making culture, history, and creativity accessible to everyone, addressing pressing societal issues, fostering critical reflection, and inspiring new ideas.
Henk Slager
Until recently, the exhibition was primarily a dispositive, a unitary system of unambiguous “expression” or completed display, reflecting in its fixity the imagined self-sufficiency of the autonomous work of art that the exhibition is supposed to mediate. Over the past decade, a paradigm shift has taken place: exhibitions are now understood much more as platforms for knowledge-in-the-making than as static forms of dissemination. The exhibition has the potential to be a mode of research action.
Cătălin Gheorghe
An exhibition is commonly understood as a medium, a setting for artworks, or a statement. It is a display of artifacts, structures, ideas, and gestures in an organized way. The production and presentation of an exhibition are co-dependent on an institutional capacity or self-organized initiative, presented in a given space (i.e., museum, white cube, black box, public space, landscape), and to be received by different audiences.
Exhibitions have changed in approach and function over time. They have not only reacted against the idea of a prescribed political or natural order of display but also have questioned their space as a privileged site of capitalist forms of representation. In these conditions, the understanding of “exhibition” as predominantly a medium for displaying evocative manifestations of power would compromise the chances of seeing the exhibition as a process based on imaginative instances of criticism.
A radical use of the exhibition would be the transposition (as a trans[ex]position) of the actual political space and historical time of its event modeling, in Michel Foucault’s words, a relational heterotopia but also manifestations of heterocronia. The trans[ex]position of time and space would have the quality to intervene in multiple specific contexts creating different perspectives and unexpected situations. There would be different kinds of trans[ex]positions, from interventions based on hacking, to complex installations based on research. Opening new reflections on the potentiality of an exhibition, the trans[ex]position would make use of xeno-practices, redefining spaces of perception as xeno-spaces (as non-familiar spaces of thought and counteraction).
Hongjohn Lin
For any exhibition, we are always searching for something novel, original, or better yet, unprecedented. It is true that there is a plethora of exhibitions across diverse settings—museums, galleries, art fairs, community interventions, and biennials. Moreover, the expanding field of exhibitions is increasingly shifting from the physical to the virtual. Both spectators and art communities eagerly await the next event, just as social media feverishly fabricates fleeting memories of the latest spectacle—fifteen minutes of web fame, all too soon forgotten. We live in an era of hyper-metabolism of memory, where everything must go viral and fade rapidly, even faster than fashion trends. The more exhibitions proliferate, the less spectators seem able to recall what they have seen. This phenomenon promotes “exhibition amnesia,” an ideology that emphasizes the new while neglecting the past. Every new opening closes a door to what came before. The white cube, a dominant mode of exhibition display, symbolically ‘whitewashes’ memory, replacing it with interior installations surrounded by sterile drywalls. Exhibition spectatorship is driven by the demand for the novel, the immediate, and the up-to-the-minute, while past exhibitions serve only as references, easily becoming obsolete and forgotten. The genealogy of exhibitions reflects this shift, intertwined with the rise of modern museums in the 18th century and the development of capitalism, where the burgeoning bourgeoisie played a significant role in shaping museums as “public” spaces. As museums became more accessible, they began to reflect and reinforce the values and ideologies of emerging capitalist society, positioning exhibitions not only as new standardized displays but also as expressions of social relations mediated by capital.
Carolina Rito
An exhibition is a selected and curated presentation of objects in an institution of display or in an off-site where the display of artifacts is identified as an exhibition. It is typically curated by someone or a group of people and who are likely identified in the credits of the show as its curators.
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Nina Liebenberg
The exhibitionary relates to the power structures (mostly unseen) that accompany the making of and running of an exhibition or institution with an exhibition program. The “exhibitionary complex,” first introduced by Tony Bennett [“The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, no. 4 (Spring 1988), 73–102], was revealed in practice through the work of artist-curators (such as Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and Fred Wilson) practicing institutional critique from the 1960s onward. Students in the curatorial program at the University of Cape Town, in which I taught for many years, engage with the exhibitionary by interrogating how the apartheid ideology influenced the categorization, storage, and display of the collections housed in the city’s museums and institutions. They are then asked to consider the task of local curators in relation to justice and restoration, latent collections and absence, as well as public vs. private space, along with ownership and agency.
The term “exhibitionary” refers to a system of protocols, institutions, and frameworks that shape how exhibitions are conceived, presented, and experienced. It highlights the often-unseen mechanisms behind these presentations, unfolding power relations, historical narratives, and institutional forces that determine what gets exhibited and how. In this sense, the exhibitionary is an invisible but pervasive structure that extends beyond institutional spaces, influencing everyday life, affecting how people understand and engage with the world around them. By challenging traditional power dynamics, the exhibitionary fosters collaboration and co-creation while questioning established norms. It reflects and shapes cultural practices in an ongoing cycle of reinterpretation and critique.
Henk Slager
In the current paradigm, new forms of interaction (collaboration, co-production, current visual technologies), and transgressive practices (crossovers between the different topologies of visual and performative art, oscillations between various epistemic registers) are taking place. Such modes of meaning-making require more dynamic and expanded exhibition formats, such as archives, community-based projects, concept exhibitions, meeting spaces, and interventions in the public space. See, for example, Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).
Cătălin Gheorghe
The exhibitionary apparatus generates certain perceptions of its intentions that often obscure its actual political privileges. It seeks to influence beliefs, reasons, and behaviors; and its rationale and modus operandi are ordering discourses that mask its power structure. These are consequences of its paradoxical presence, acting from a political distance but speaking in full proximity to the audience. In this way, its dominant normative views are mediated through direct concrete displays that, in effect, regulate its viewers’ perceptions. This only underscores the fact that its constitutive colonial derivation inflects it with a deeply negative political condition of hierarchical power.
Even if the exhibitionary moment seems to be not only ideological but also epistemologically compromised, there are substituent chances to overcome institutional conspiracies. Imagining a new, even radical, exhibitionary (social) design that would presuppose the use of present exhibition infrastructures to mediate reformations and reparations, or even revolutionary formulations against the reproduction of the exhibitionary’s underlying privileges.
Hongjohn Lin
In contrast to conventional exhibitions housed in the white cube, the "exhibitionary" moves beyond the gallery ideology, expanding into new forms of public engagement through screenings, performances, experiments, talks, and gatherings. These participatory actions reveal how the gallery ideology is constructed and how (art) histories are generated. The exhibitionary, in short, exposes the backstage mechanisms through which realities are shaped. By reconfiguring the dynamics between acting and enactment, the exhibitionary denaturalizes traditional exhibition formats. The conventional roles of artist, spectator, and curator are rewritten, disrupting the symbolic order to reveal how exhibitions construct reality. This approach aligns with various contemporary curatorial practices, including institutional critique, performativity, criticality, the educational turn, and the expanded field of exhibition-making.
Carolina Rito
The exhibitionary is the network of protocols and regimes (material, conceptual, epistemic, institutional, etc.) through which exhibitions are seen, conceptualized, and signified. Despite being mainly invisible, the exhibitionary is made manifest in very concrete forms. An exhibition’s arrangement of objects and discourse can be understood as the manifested artifact of the exhibitionary. In other words, and similar to Michel Foucault’s notion of “episteme,” the exhibitionary is a regime of intelligibility that pertains to displays as historical constructs. We can say that the defining frame of an exhibition is always a subset of the exhibitionary, which cannot be contained or even provide a totalizing view. Simply, the exhibitionary is the apparatus through which exhibitions surface or are made to surface. Instead, it is larger than the sum of its parts, in a cycle of constant evolution and transforming norms. As Keller Easterling has written about infrastructure, it can be said as well about the exhibitionary that it “is too big and not at one and the same place. It cannot be addressed through its shape or outline, but rather via its disposition—potentials unfolding in time and territory.” The exhibitionary depends on its activation in order to make sense.
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Nina Liebenberg is a South African curator, currently conducting her post-doctoral research at the University of the Arts, Helsinki. Before moving to Finland, Liebenberg spent the last ten years working at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Curating the Archive, convening a selection of courses for its curatorial program. She uses curation as methodology to explore various overlaps and connections between diverse university departments, drawing on their disciplinary objects collections to curate exhibitions that surface uncanny cross-disciplinary connections and extend the meaning of how these materials are understood in their host departments. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).
Henk Slager’s focus has been on research and visual art for the last twenty years. He was a Lecturer at De Appel Curatorial Program (1995-2020), Visiting Professor of Artistic Research (Uniarts Helsinki 2010-2015, 2024-), and Dean of MaHKU Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (HKU Utrecht 2003-2018). He is currently working for the same school on the development of a practice-based doctoral program. Slager co-initiated the European Artistic Research Network (EARN), a network investigating the consequences of artistic research for current art education through symposia, expert meetings, and presentations. Departing from a similar focus on artistic research he published The Pleasure of Research, an overview of curatorial research projects (a.o. Shanghai Biennale, 2008; Tbilisi Triennial, 2012; Aesthetic Jam Taipei Biennial, 2014; 5th Guangzhou Triennial, 2015; Research Pavilion Venice, 2015-2019; and 9th Bucharest Biennale, 2020). A follow-up publication will be presented in 2025. Slager is currently co-convening the 6th Asia Triennial Manchester (2025).
Cătălin Gheorghe is a theoretician, curator, editor, and Professor of Curatorial Research and Practices at “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași, Romania. He is the editor of Vector Publications, including the recent volumes Learning by curating. Current trajectories in critical curatorial research (2022) and Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination, co-edited with Mick Wilson (2021). He is also the curator of Vector Studio, a platform for critical research and art production based on the understanding of art as experimental journalism. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).
Hongjohn Lin is an artist, curator, and Professor at Taipei National University of the Arts, holding a PhD in Arts and Humanities from New York University. His notable exhibitions include the Taipei Biennial (2004, 2012), Asian Manchester Triennial (2008), and Guangzhou Triennial (2015). Lin curated the Taiwan Pavilion’s Atopia at the Venice Biennial (2007) and co-curated the Taipei Biennial with Tirdad Zolghadr (2010). He authored introductions for the Chinese editions of Art Power (Boris Groys) and Artificial Hells (Claire Bishop), and his publications include Poetics of Curating (2018). Lin is the founding editor of Curatography and is currently curating Asian Manchester Triennial 2025. He is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).
Carolina Rito is Professor of Creative Practice Research at the Research Centre for Arts, Memory, and Communities, Coventry University, UK. She is a researcher and curator whose work is situated at the intersection of knowledge production, the curatorial, and contested historical narratives. Rito is an Executive Board Member of the Midlands Higher Education & Culture Forum and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She has served as the Executive Editor of The Contemporary Journal and has published in international journals such as King’s Review, Mousse Magazine, Wrong Wrong, and The Curatorial. From 2017 to 2019, Rito was Head of Public Programs and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, leading the partnership with Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. She holds a PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also taught from 2014 to 2016. She lectures internationally—in Europe, South America, and the Middle East—on her research and curatorial studies. She is a member of the Curatorial Studies Workshop, part of the Expanded Artistic Research Network (EARN).