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This article presents an overview of Palestinian exhibition making in the twentieth century. It addresses an absence of academic engagement with how, starting in the 1920s, a repertoire of Palestinian pedagogical and representational materials, temporary and makeshift spaces, and multiple protodiplomatic and unionized efforts under the Palestinian Liberation Organization informed a culture of exhibition making that created critical sites for: cultivating and critiquing taste within art movements and among Palestinians; operationalizing national sentiment and political consciousness; and mobilizing international support around the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause. Specifically, the article accounts for the Palestinian mobilization of exhibitions in response to European and Zionist expansionism (1917–48), as a social praxis of community building and resilience (1948–64), and as a form of political resistance through the radical internationalization of Palestinian cultural affairs (1964–87). It culminates with a discussion of the first intifada and the morphing of exhibition culture into the Palestinian Authority's state-building project following the Oslo Accords (1987–93). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What if an artwork changes its shape and sense with every encounter? Is there such a thing as polyphonic meaning, resulting from the interactions with an artwork? Barbara Preisig's semi-fictional play brings the reader to a scene at Kunstmuseum Bern. It tells the story of a guided public tour through El Anatsui's Solo exhibition Triumphant Scale. The curator, eager to provide key information about the works, finds herself in a vivid discussion around Anatsui's work Gravity and Grace. Does the artwork's shape resemble an elephant? Should the patterns remind us of the colorful Ghanaian fabrics or, in contrast, do they depict nothing but light, form, transparency and physicality? May El Anatsui be called an African artist or not? The audience – among them a protestant pastor, a musician, the artist, seven-year-old Emma – gathers on stage, observed by the narrator, who listens closely to their interpretations. When suddenly five historical busts, part of the neo-classical staircase, get involved in an argument with the artwork, the discussion threatens to get out of hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguably the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, also known as the bienal da antropofagia, is the most internationally celebrated iteration of the Brazilian biennial. Curated by Paulo Herkenhoff in 1998, the exhibition was acknowledged in the international press as shifting the focus of the Bienal de São Paulo away from its earlier international model based on the Biennale di Venezia toward a more geopolitical, Southern one closer to the Havana Biennial. Famously, Herkenhoff mobilised the modernist concept of cultural cannibalism (anthropophagy) coined by Brazilian intellectual Oswald de Andrade in 1928 to make a commentary of contemporary art, placing Brazil at the centre of the exhibition. This article revisits this celebrated exhibition to consider it not as an isolated curatorial tour-de-force, but as deeply inserted in its historical moment (i.e., post-multiculturalism in a decade marked by neoliberalism and biennalisation) and stemming from transformations in the very São Paulo Biennial, which had been uplifted monetarily and curatorially by the two previous exhibitions (the 22nd and 23rd curated by Nelson Aguilar). Ultimately, it also surveys how this show contributed to the internationalisation of the national concept of anthropophagy and of Brazilian artists associated with it.

This special issue of OBOE presents a set of case studies on the Bienal de São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil), the second biennial exhibition inaugurated in 1951 following the model of the Venice Biennial. It gathers nine original peer-review articles by a team of international scholars that provide new pathways for understanding the complexities of this Southern biennial and for interrogating its position within the larger history of perennial exhibitions. From in-depth analyses of the Biennial’s award-winning artists and of its acquisition awards that today constitute the archive of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP), to examinations of specific national representations and important editions, the research presented here is not only relevant to the field of art history with its current focus on exhibition histories and the expansion of the canon beyond US-Europe, but also to scholarship and research in Latin American art and exhibition histories more generally.

This article discusses Ghanaian ceramic art and the critical interventions that are driving an emerging contemporary ceramic practice. Over the last decade (2011–22), Ghanaian ceramic art appears to have had a stagnant traditional practice and has struggled to be seen, heard and valued within local and global contemporary art discourse. Reviews and reforms of art education in college and tertiary curriculum have provided critical interventions to address this situation. Discussing the works of Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng, Eugene Ofori Agyei, Frederick Ebenezer Okai, Alex Awuku and other artists, this article reveals how young Ghanaian contemporary ceramic artists are navigating a path to creating new artistic identities and pushing the boundaries of conventional Ghanaian ceramics. These developments also point to the meaningful expansion of ceramics in contemporary art education more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exhibitions are embodied knowledge, and the processes of making exhibitions are also in themselves knowledge production practices. Science and technology exhibitions are therefore doubly of interest to historians of science: both as epistemic agents and as research methods. Yet both exhibitions and exhibition-making practices are ephemeral, as is the subsequent experience of the visitor. How can we research, interrogate, and understand both the productive creation of exhibitions and the phenomenologies and epistemologies of their reception and impact? "Exhibition histories" has become a significant field of late, most closely associated with research on art exhibitions but also extending to world and trade fairs, and now increasingly crossing over into histories of science and technology. It is not an easy task: the range of exhibition archive materials includes – but is not limited to – 35mm slides, architectural blueprints, models, drawings, briefs, memos, budgets, press films, reviews, and personal accounts. This primary material is distributed unevenly across public and organized repositories, closed commercial archives, the personal papers of designers, often embargoed national bureaus of information, and more. Further, the experience of visiting an exhibition leaves far fewer traces to follow, requiring the researcher to do different kinds of things with the same widely varied material. This paper proposes methodologies for historians of science and technology wishing to understand the spatialization of science in exhibition contexts, the impacts of science exhibitions, and the more elusive phenomenological aspects of the exhibition visitor experience. Historians of science must accurately historicize context while researching both along and against the grain of archival material left by the making of exhibitions, as well as understanding the embodied trajectories of visitors. The practice of making exhibitions can also offer the researcher critically valuable insights into what to look for – and what may be absent – in archival records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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he LYC Museum & Art Gallery (the LYC) in the Cumbrian village of Banks (astride Hadrian’s Wall) was the single-minded effort of artist Li Yuan-chia (1929–1994). His initials gave the museum its name. It was sited in a set of converted farm buildings that Li had bought from his friend, the painter Winifred Nicholson. Between 1972 and 1983, the museum showcased the work of more than 320 artists—from local artists (Andy Christian, Susie Honour) to totemic national figures (Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth), and contemporary artists, now of international renown (Lygia Clark, Andy Goldsworthy), but then barely known in Britain. A young David Nash designed the LYC’s window. The programme reflected Li’s circuitous cosmopolitanism, his commitment to art as experimentation, and his expansive range of interests: the LYC had a children’s room, library, performance space, printing press, communal kitchen, and a garden. The networks and practices that the LYC enabled and enriched have yet to be studied widely, but it is an exemplary site from which to explore how friendships inform shared practices, generate work, and socialise narratives; and, how the LYC itself functioned as a kind of infrastructure. This article is anchored in the recent exhibition Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition (Manchester Art Gallery, 2018–2019) and its accompanying symposium The LYC Museum & Art Gallery and the Museum as Practice (2019). It explores the idea of “friendship”, and to a lesser extent that of “infrastructure”, through the lens of three works in the Speech Acts exhibition. It forms part of an ongoing collective effort towards inquiries that cross disciplinary and geographic borders, and test polyphonic, multi-authored, and speculative approaches that I have described elsewhere as “art histories of excess”. It invites methodological reflections on the forms and possibilities for conducting and staging collaborative research, and on wider questions of how historic entanglements have the potential to expand existing histories of British art.

This essay is an exercise in exhibition history, focused on Landscape in Britain, c.1750–1850 held at the Tate Gallery in the winter of 1973, in which curators Conal Shields and Leslie Parris set out to question received ideas about the rise of landscape painting in Britain, and to widen the range of materials for investigation. Drawing on correspondence and the designer’s plans in the Tate Archives, aspects of the concept, installation, reception, and legacy of the exhibition are considered. The exhibition is seen in the context of a wider reappraisal of landscape as a field of study, but also in relation to the renewal of landscape as an arena for contemporary art practice. The discussion is bracketed by that of two further exhibitions, Constable: The Art of Nature at the Tate in 1971 and an ambitious sequel in 1983, in which a survey of the next one hundred years of landscape art in Britain was attempted.

The article presents a chronology of exhibitions and related public and political events from the seventies in Hungary centred around the theme of peace and solidarity, transcending the ideological and rhetorical opposition so often drawn between state- and self-organised culture in Eastern Europe. It demonstrates how the approach of exhibition history can be used to get a better understanding of cultural events as intersections between artistic concepts and social-historical-political situations. The chronology sets out from the case study of a Peace cycle created in 1950s by Gyula Hincz, an artist using a moderately modernist artistic language of socialist humanism. The work is connected to the emergence of the international Peace Movement and cultural diplomacy after World War II, but was also featured later in an international solidarity exhibition in Beirut in 1978. The article reviews the ambivalent and geopolitically changing relationship between engaged art and modernism through the evolution and transfiguration of the iconography of peace and solidarity from the Peace Doves to situational exercises on otherness by such neo-avantgarde artists as Miklós Erdély and Tamás Szentjóby. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores curatorial practice that has technology-reliant works at its epicentre, arguing that for an efficient methodology to historicize the latter there needs to be a reconfiguration of the curatorial scope and a holistic approach to viewing and documenting exhibitions. Based on theoretical research and install decisions of recent years, the ways in which curatorial practice can be reconfigured within the art canon to inform art history, as well as to accommodate developments in exhibition practices are examined.

By analysing a series of exhibition projects responding to central changes in web technology since its public unveiling (1991), this study identifies a historical trajectory for discussing the evolution of curating on the web. Such evolution highlights how curators have devised exhibition models that operate as platforms for not only displaying art specific to the web, but also for producing and disseminating it in a way that responds to the developments of web technology—and its socio-cultural and economic impact. With the massification of web tools, in fact, these platforms have generated distributed systems of artistic production free from the physical and conceptual limitations of the gallery and museum space. They have not only become spaces for displaying art, but also platforms that nurture its production, different modes of audience engagement and critique the canons of the institutionalised art world. Originating from the desire to reduce the historical fragmentation of this field of work and its partial mapping, this study follows a periodisation that starts from the early internet, with its BBS-enabled platforms such as ARTEX (1980), to introduce the 1990s experimentations with the web browser and the developments of projects like äda’web (1995). It then dives into the Web 2.0 when, with the platformisation of the technology, curators developed an array of approaches for adopting existing web services, as in the instances of CuratingYouTube (2007−present) and #exstrange (2017). Lastly, it outlines the trends of today’s web, which saw the birth of projects like the blockchain-enabled cointemporary (2014), to then draw conclusions about the relevance of this historical trajectory in the field of curatorial studies and the production of web-based and digital art.

Reconstructions of historic exhibitions made with current technologies can present beguiling illusions, but they also put us in danger of recreating the past in our own image. This article and the accompanying reconstruction explore methods for representing lost displays, with an emphasis on visualizing uncertainty, illuminating process, and understanding the mediated nature of period images. These issues are highlighted in a partial recreation of a loan show held at the British Institution, London, in 1823, which featured the works of Sir Joshua Reynolds alongside continental old masters. This recreation demonstrates how speculative reconstructions can nonetheless shed light on ephemeral displays, revealing powerful visual and conceptual dialogues that took place on the crowded walls of nineteenth-century exhibitions.

In 1955, the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts was founded. It was the first curatorial initiative that aimed to link graphic artists working around the world and with those divided by the Cold War. The Ljubljana Biennial became a major success and its model quickly spread worldwide, augmenting the international circulation of prints and exchanges of artistic concepts. Over the next twenty years similar exhibitions were established in Krakow, Tallinn, San Juan, Santiago de Chile, Cali, Tokyo, Cairo, Fredrikstad, Frechen, Sofia and Bradford. The Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts offered an opportunity for artists from Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, such as Andrzej Lachowicz, Mauricio Leib Lasansky, Adolfo Quinteros and Aleš Veselý, to exhibit their works alongside the protagonists of the western contemporary graphic art circuit such as Robert Rauschenberg, Antonio Segui, Yozo Hamaguchi, Max Bill and Victor Vasarely. The network of exhibitions that followed the example set by Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts became a window into the world not only for printmakers, but also for a number of artists who were affected by Cold War cultural exclusion. The network of dedicated international print exhibitions created favourable conditions for an emerging third space, which became a platform for communication between the cultures divided by the Iron Curtain. This article focuses on the curatorial assumptions that brought the Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana to life and questions its position as a cultural cornerstone for the Non-Aligned geopolitical order.

Displays of art in public or private spaces have long been of interest to curators, gallerists, artists and art historians. The emergence of gallery paintings at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the photographic documentation of (modern) exhibitions testify to that. Taken as factual documents, these images are not only representative of social status, wealth or the museum’s thematic focus, but also contain information about artistic relations and exhibition practices. Digitization efforts of previous years have made these documents, including photographs, catalogs or press releases, available to public audiences and scholars. While a manual analysis has proved to be insufficient, because of the sheer number of available data, computational approaches and tools allowed for a greater access. The following article describes how digital images of exhibitions, as released by the New York Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2016, are studied with a retrieval system to analyze in which artistic contexts selected artworks were presented in exhibits.

How can a history of exhibitions inform curators on the challenges of exhibiting new media art? How can histories of exhibitions dealing with interaction and participation inform the curation of new media art involving these behaviours? Exhibitions of broadly conceptual or immaterial work such as Information (1970) and Les Immatériaux (1985) lead to an examination of exhibitions where participation is key, including Bodyspacemotionthings (1971 and 2009), Serious Games (1996), 010101 (2001), The Art of Participation (2008), and Current (2011). New media artworks including Talkaoke, www_hack, and Random Information Exchange help to establish critical categories for different kinds of participatory systems. For future critical art histories of participatory art exhibitions, I propose that an effective method would include a combination of documentary sources, such as installation images, audience data, and crowd-sourced documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores curatorial practice that has technology-reliant works at its epicentre, arguing that for an efficient methodology to historicize the latter there needs to be a reconfiguration of the curatorial scope and a holistic approach to viewing and documenting exhibitions. Based on theoretical research and install decisions of recent years, the ways in which curatorial practice can be reconfigured within the art canon to inform art history, as well as to accommodate developments in exhibition practices are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analysing a series of exhibition projects responding to central changes in web technology since its public unveiling (1991), this study identifies a historical trajectory for discussing the evolution of curating on the web. Such evolution highlights how curators have devised exhibition models that operate as platforms for not only displaying art specific to the web, but also for producing and disseminating it in a way that responds to the developments of web technology—and its socio-cultural and economic impact. With the massification of web tools, in fact, these platforms have generated distributed systems of artistic production free from the physical and conceptual limitations of the gallery and museum space. They have not only become spaces for displaying art, but also platforms that nurture its production, different modes of audience engagement and critique the canons of the institutionalised art world. Originating from the desire to reduce the historical fragmentation of this field of work and its partial mapping, this study follows a periodisation that starts from the early internet, with its BBS-enabled platforms such as ARTEX (1980), to introduce the 1990s experimentations with the web browser and the developments of projects like äda'web (1995). It then dives into the Web 2.0 when, with the platformisation of the technology, curators developed an array of approaches for adopting existing web services, as in the instances of CuratingYouTube (2007–present) and #exstrange (2017). Lastly, it outlines the trends of today's web, which saw the birth of projects like the blockchain-enabled cointemporary (2014), to then draw conclusions about the relevance of this historical trajectory in the field of curatorial studies and the production of web-based and digital art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Displays of art in public or private spaces have long been of interest to curators, gallerists, artists and art historians. The emergence of gallery paintings at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the photographic documentation of (modern) exhibitions testify to that. Taken as factual documents, these images are not only representative of social status, wealth or the museum's thematic focus, but also contain information about artistic relations and exhibition practices. Digitization efforts of previous years have made these documents, including photographs, catalogs or press releases, available to public audiences and scholars. While a manual analysis has proved to be insufficient, because of the sheer number of available data, computational approaches and tools allowed for a greater access. The following article describes how digital images of exhibitions, as released by the New York Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2016, are studied with a retrieval system to analyze in which artistic contexts selected artworks were presented in exhibits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1955, the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts was founded. It was the first curatorial initiative that aimed to link graphic artists working around the world and with those divided by the Cold War. The Ljubljana Biennial became a major success and its model quickly spread worldwide, augmenting the international circulation of prints and exchanges of artistic concepts. Over the next twenty years similar exhibitions were established in Krakow, Tallinn, San Juan, Santiago de Chile, Cali, Tokyo, Cairo, Fredrikstad, Frechen, Sofia and Bradford. The Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts offered an opportunity for artists from Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, such as Andrzej Lachowicz, Mauricio Leib Lasansky, Adolfo Quinteros and Aleš Veselý, to exhibit their works alongside the protagonists of the western contemporary graphic art circuit such as Robert Rauschenberg, Antonio Segui, Yozo Hamaguchi, Max Bill and Victor Vasarely. The network of exhibitions that followed the example set by Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts became a window into the world not only for printmakers, but also for a number of artists who were affected by Cold War cultural exclusion. The network of dedicated international print exhibitions created favourable conditions for an emerging third space, which became a platform for communication between the cultures divided by the Iron Curtain. This article focuses on the curatorial assumptions that brought the Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana to life and questions its position as a cultural cornerstone for the Non-Aligned geopolitical order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]