Reimagining the Exhibition-as-Research for Artistic Research: Insights from the Essay Form

Jasper Delbecke

A note to the reader as an introduction and a look ahead

Dear Reader,

My present and my two future contributions to COLLATERAL are dedicated to my ongoing research revolving around the possible forms of the exhibition-as-research within and for artistic research. The discourse around the exhibition-as-research that has gained momentum in recent years has been primarily driven by theoretical and academic perspectives. This predominantly involves curators and researchers active within this (often bizarre) world called “Academia”, who mobilise the exhibition as a form to present their research. It is from this domain that a discourse has emerged which explores how an exhibition can be and do more than merely presenting research results.

Among the many different definitions and interpretations of the concepts of “research exhibition” and “exhibition-as-research”, one recurring desire stands out, namely the wish to incorporate the processual nature inherent to the act of research into the exhibition and share it with an audience. This research process is one that (all too) often does not follow the predetermined plan. Hypotheses do not align with reality after conducting experiments. Certain choices close off potential research paths. Other choices open unexpected avenues, resulting in an explosion of new interlocutors, data, ideas, and insights. A new generation of scholars within museum and curatorial studies, clustering around the notion of exhibition-as-research, expresses a desire to make this bumpy journey – characteristic of doing research – part of the process of working towards an exhibition and to acknowledge it as an equally valuable form of knowledge production.

As was, and still is, often the case, the pioneers in developing exhibitions heavily relying on text and image materials were… artists. Since the 1990s, the art world has been familiar with various forms of research-based art. The theoretical reflections on these forms of research-based art, which have increased in presence over the past twenty years, have prompted further dissemination of research-based (art) practices. In my ongoing research, I am curious about the role of the exhibition-as-research for a group of art practitioners who find themselves between the domain of art and that of academic research: the so-called Ph.D.’s -in -the -arts.

In my research, I explore how these researchers-in-the -arts present their research results (in an exhibition) and what the (theoretical) developments within, on the one hand, research-based art and, on the other hand, the theoretical discourse around exhibition-as-research can mean for their ongoing doctoral research. The essay as a form is the concept I use within my research and serves as a framework to reflect on exhibition practices. But why borrow a term from the world of literature to speak about exhibition practices within research-in-the-arts? I answer this question here, in my first contribution to the COLLISION section of COLLATERAL.

This first COLLISION embarks with an exploration of how the essay as a form has been previously used within museum studies and curatorial studies. This brief exploratory exercise allows me to clarify how I understand the relationship between the form of the essay and exhibition practices. To clarify my interpretation, I refer to the inspiring practices of Jozef Wouters, Walid Raad, and Ho Rui An. This first contribution displays concisely the theoretical foundations on which my ongoing research – titled “Stretching the essay-exhibition” – rests.

Drawing on my research on how the essay form has more recently been expanded in the arts, in particular performing arts, I intend with my paper to highlight some of the essay’s characteristics which help to have a more apt understanding of what can make an exhibition “essayistic” and what the form of the essay potentially has to offer for the practice of exhibition-making. These two distinguishing features of the essay are, as I argue, first, the outspoken presence of the author, and secondly – and inherently connected with the first feature –, a self-critical and self-reflexive layer. The future two contributions will leave the theory behind and reflect on concrete collaborations and encounters resulting from my ongoing research.

The exhibition and/as the essay

In “The Exhibition as Essay. Exhibition Production as Research Process”, Mattias Bäckström develops the idea of “the exhibition as essay” as a “form and method for collaborative research” (157). Bäckström uses the essay to situate contemporary museal discourses on collaborative and participatory activities. As he explains, the exhibition as essay is

a way of conducting collaborative research, which includes inter-knowledge and inter-experience processes. This kind of essayistic collaboration considers its form, its content and its participating interpreters, with their organisation of the research work, as well as the specific characteristics of the exhibition as a spatial and temporal medium (158).

What the exhibition as essay produces, as Bäckström concludes in his text, is “hybrid knowledge in the margins of academic disciplines, but in the centre of research fields like artistic, design and practice research as well as of the practical turn in science and technology studies” (159).

Given the desire to highlight and revalue the research-oriented nature of exhibitions and articulate the dialogue of ideas taking place within this process, the reference to the essay is not so remarkable. An essay does not present a convincing statement or a perspicuous argument. On the contrary, the essay displays a probing search and a process of thinking. These characteristics of the essay are also reflected in the desires of researchers and exhibition makers. As Peter Bjerregaard points out in the opening paragraph of his edited volume Exhibitions as Research. Experimental Methods in Museums (2020), what a new generation of exhibition makers aspire to achieve is conceptualizing an exhibition which can effectively work as “a way of exploring the world around us rather than mirroring it” (1). As Bjerregaard adds, this inquisitive approach to exhibitions raises questions about how to present knowledge-in-the-making, and how a different relation needs to be built with partakers and audiences.

Taking these questions and challenges into account, one traces parallels with the essay form. In his text “The Essay as Form”, Theodor W. Adorno already defended the way the essay provided a place for another way of doing research. Adorno famously stated that “the essay proceeds methodically unmethodically” (38). The thought exercise one embarks on in an essay is not determined by calibrated procedures or existing methods. The process of thinking shaped in an essay is guided by “the experiential, the transient and the ephemeral” (35). In this process, inspiration is taken from “what others have done before” (30). The efforts displayed in an essay pierce “what hides behind the façade under the name of objectivity” (30) and initiate an act of speculation on “specific, culturally pre-formed objects” (29).

Adorno saw the essay as an antidote to a way of doing philosophy that felt too rigid because it had to be done according to certain well-defined methods and procedures. Researchers and exhibition makers who are occupied with the question of how an exhibition can be more than the mere display of research results are drawn to the possibilities that the essay offers, as Adorno depicts them in his text.

The essay and the curatorial: the essay-exhibition

Bäckström is not the first scholar who discussed the essay form in relation to the exhibition. Allison Butler, for example, used the term “essay-installation”. The way video installations can open up “towards the outside world”, and at the same time firmly situate themselves “as a discursive structure within the walls of the museum” incited her to mark these kinds of installations as essay(istic). Butler conceives “the gallery as a location for engaged intellectual reflection, an informal public sphere, more like a debating chamber than an immersive spectacle” (142-143). In the same vein, Carolino Rito focuses in her text “The Essayistic in the Curatorial – Repurposing the Politics of Exhibition” (2023) “on the concatenation of the essayistic and the curatorial” (101). Rito recognizes how “the essayistic has the capacity to push the boundaries of traditional or accepted formats, assembling its components in a novel way, causing meanings to be unsettled and rearranged”. Here, she situates the convergence between the essay form and the curatorial:

Similarly [to the essay], the curatorial has been interested not only in the production of new assemblages, but also in the structures where those assemblages are made possible with regards to the power structures in which they sit, as well as the new meanings and senses they enact. In that way, the essayistic nature of the curatorial works at the aesthetic and the epistemic level, providing the new formats and aesthetics of knowability (101).

Consequently, both Rito and Bäckström place “the essayistic exhibition, as both a method of conducting research and a form of communicating research results”, against the backdrop of the so-called curatorial turn. The more ambiguous and abstract noun “curatorial”, as introduced by art historians Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck, refers to the self-reflexive take on the practice of curating, underscoring a sensitivity to the infrastructures, epistemologies and power relations involved in the making of exhibitions. The curatorial aspires to foreground the relational and situational aspects of exhibition-making: what is exhibited no longer serves as mere information but is apprehended as a series of proposals or provocations on a subject matter (22-31).

The most outspoken engagement with the essay form from an exhibition-making perspective is found in the notion of the “essay-exhibition”, as coined by German curator Anselm Franke. Franke started to label exhibitions as such during his time as the head of the Visual Arts and Film Department at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin from 2013 until 2022. Franke and his co-curators mobilized the exhibition form as a medium for thought and speculation. Rather than a sphere of aesthetic contemplation, the exhibition space in these essay-exhibitions is turned into a public arena for the presentation and interrogation of ideas. In doing so, the boundaries that too often separate different modes of cultural inquiry can be broken down. Despite their thematic variety, these “essay-exhibitions” developed in the context of the HKW have several shared features:

— They are thematically and conceptually driven. — They are densely discursive and research-based endeavours that make significant temporal and intellectual demands on the visitors. — The traditional art object is decentered or even disregarded. — The exhibitions display a lot of archival materials. — Contemporary issues are encountered through historical detours.

Even if Franke sometimes tends to use overly difficult and theoretical terms to clearly describe and define his concept, the following description is an apt expression of what he aims to achieve with his concept:

Working with art, text, and other artifacts, the essay exhibition seeks to induce a definitional crisis with regards to the ‘topic’ of the exhibition, the subject matter, the objects. […] It is not about using art to illustrate a theme, as is often assumed, but the opposite: to challenge discourse with art and art with discourse, in order to make this oscillation between meaning and material productive. This allows for a precise, new kind of conversation; an ‘undisciplined’ and unsettling form of knowledge then sometimes comes to the fore, which puts reality and its perception into question again and again (Franke, n. pag.).

Precisely this self-reflective and self-critical layer is distinct to the essay. It helps to differentiate the essay from other artistic modes of expression that are fragmentary, associative and inconclusive. In the essay form, an author is emphatically present. The searching way in which the author reveals in and by an essay their searching thinking leaves room for doubt, speculation and not-knowing. It is this searching attitude that reveals and questions not only the author’s position but also the medium in which one works. An author does not only weigh and challenge their position and thinking as an author. In tandem, this questioning of the authorial position comes with testing and interrogating the artistic means, modes, conventions and codes one is accustomed to. It is an essential trait of the essay form which goes back to the writings of the godfather of the genre, Michel de Montaigne. When reading Montaigne’s essays, one frequently finds reflections on the act of writing, the space in which this act of writing takes place and how the books surrounding him sway his thinking.

In the case of Franke, this self-reflective and self-critical layer is closely connected to the genealogy of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), the institution where he developed most of his exhibition projects. This multidisciplinary arts institution was founded in 1989 with a mandate to focus on non-European cultural production. Located in the heart of Berlin’s Tiergarten, the monumental modernist building was erected with the financial support of the US at the height of the Cold War. The building was used in the 1960s to promote liberal values through art but afterwards turned out to have been sponsored by the CIA. Franke’s essay-exhibitions were always conceptualized in response to HKW’s problematic history and investigated how it infected the institution’s mission as a filter and gatekeeper to what is considered art. For example, in Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2018), Franke and his team investigated the ideological backdrop influencing how modernism was presented as “universal”. In a similar vein, the exhibition project The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside (2013) examined the legacy of the Californian counterculture in the present and how some of the central ideas emerging in 1968 became the basis for the rise of the digital network culture. Both exhibitions offered a knowing critique of the HKW as a symbol of capitalism’s utopian postwar cultural universalism.

Franke’s self-reflective and self-critical take on the context he and his team were operating in corresponds with what Adorno articulated in his text “The Essay as Form”.

[…] the essay does not proceed blindly and automatically, […], but must reflect on itself at every moment. This reflection extends not only to its relationship to established thought but also to its relationship with rhetoric and communication (46).

In sum, distinct to an essay is how critical reflections concern on the one hand how the author is positioned vis-à-vis the addressed subject matter. On the other hand, it concerns the codes and conventions of the artistic means employed to discuss this subject matter. Highlighting these essential traits of the essay and how this could be traced in the practice of exhibition-making, as demonstrated by Anselm Franke, brings me to the core of my research.

As mentioned in the introduction, my research concerns how the idea, discourse and practice of the exhibition-as-research could be informed by the essay form in favour of PhD’s-in-arts. The authors shortly explored here in my opening contribution come from the more academic realm theorizing the exhibition-as-research. My quest and interest however is to circumvent (if only for a moment) theory and look at how an exhibition-as-research, with essayistic qualities, can grow more organically from artistic practices themselves, rather than being a translation of theory to practice. Therefore, I would like to discuss in conclusion of my first entry to the COLLISIONS-series with three examples: Zoological Institute for Recently Extinct Species by Jozef Wouters, Two Drops per Heartbeat: A free fall through the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections in Madrid and elsewhere by Walid Raad and Asia the Unmiraculous by Ho Rui An.

Artists inciting to reimagine the essay-exhibition

The first element that stands out in Zoological Institute for Recently Extinct Species is Wouters’ emphatic position and his critical approach to the medium he works with (which, in this case, means (museum) scenography). Wouters takes the floor when he guides the audience during the evening tour. His exposé does not address what the individual exhibits mean to him; instead, he expands on what inspired him to make this collection, the issues and challenges he encountered, and the reflections raised by working on the history and historiography of nature. As Wouters narrates in his walkthrough: “A natural history museum has the task of providing us with images. The question is, which images will be able to evoke the story of a species that continually makes choices without knowing the consequences. How do you picture the not-knowing?”. Wouters is mainly interested in showing that ignorance and doubt have a place in the museum.

In an essayistic style, Wouters tells stories about extinct species, evokes their history, and points to the role humans have played in their domestication and exploitation. He explains that the artefacts exhibited in his temporary new wing “describe our natural history as a series of choices”. Some of those choices are responsible for the extinction of a particular species, as illustrated by the story of Benjamin, the last surviving Thylacinus caged at Hobart Zoo in Tasmania. As Wouters recounts, on the night of 7 September 1936, a keeper forgot to open the door to the sleeping quarters in the Thylacinus’s cage. Sometime around midnight, Benjamin died of the cold.

Other stories are less banal, as the story of the Asian carp illustrates. As an invasive species, the Asian carp invaded during the 1970s large areas of the United States’ territorial waters and threatened local ecosystems. To prevent this non-native species from reaching and disturbing the ecosystem in Lake Michigan and the surrounding Great Lakes – the largest source of drinking water on the North American continent –, the US military installed an electric barrier, designed to make sure that no Asian carp would ever succeed in reaching Lake Michigan. The infrastructure is designed to withstand hurricanes and power cuts. However, during maintenance the power needs to be switched off and an aggressive poison was used to prevent fish from passing through the barrier, killing the Asian carp as well as all the other living fish and organisms. These stories of recently extinct species are altered in Wouters’s tour by reflections on the way the relation between humans and non-humans has been put on display in institutions such as the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.

In an interview on Zoological Institute for Recently Extinct Species, Wouters refers to a quote from filmmaker Werner Herzog, who once said that an even greater problem than the ecological catastrophes themselves, is our lack of imagery adequately enabling us to represent and imagine our position on this planet (Wouters 2013, 17:20). Herzog’s statement is echoed in Wouters’s institute. The temporary wing design by Wouters and his team collides with the way objects are put on display in the official parts of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. By mimicking the scenographic conventions of the museum and intersecting the collection of the Zoological Institute for Recently Extinct Species with stories addressing the human involvement in the erasure of these species, Wouters reveals how such museums exclude the intertwinement of mankind and nature. As the largest of its kind in Europe, the dinosaur gallery of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences is not only the most imaginative gallery of the institution; it is also emblematic of how mankind’s relationship with nature and the past is represented and put on display in the West. Dinosaurs were not killed by mankind, but many other species were made extinct by human involvement in their habitat or through hunting and domestication. However, dinosaurs and taxidermied animals are exhibited in the same way, as if the stuffed lions, dolphins, or pandas died in the same way as the dinosaurs – by some external factor outside human responsibility.

Exhibiting those animals as objects in the context of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences directs visitors to take the same objective position as scientists when encountering these stuffed creatures. The balcony surrounding Wouters’s newly designed wing and the tiny desks on its balcony illustrate this binary relation. Sitting at one of the desks and listening to Wouters’s tour illustrates how in modernity nature was considered something external, something that could be studied and comprehended from a comfortable distance and exploited for human needs. Looking and listening from a similar, comfortable distance, Wouters’s scenography invites the spectators to, using Herzog’s words, imagine our position on this planet and the role played by humans in the destruction of the ecosystems that keep non-human species alive.

A second example is Walid Raad’s Two Drops per Heartbeat: A free fall through the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections in Madrid and elsewhere. This is a scripted walkthrough-performance that was part of his exhibition Cotton under my Feet (2021), presented in the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid. With this two-part project, Raad continues his expanding practice of investigating art collections and the construction of art history under violent conditions and in times of political crisis, as he did in Scratching on Things I Could Disavow (2007–present), Kicking the Dead and/or Les Louvres (2018–20) and The Atlas Group (1989–2004). The exhibition and the walkthrough-performance document Raad’s quest through Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s impressive art collection and the various frightening, joyous and perplexing situations, objects and figures he encountered while unpacking the collection’s enigmas. Three years of archival research in the collection and in-depth interviews with the collectors produced a web of (untold) stories. As Raad did in previous works, he reconstructs his journey by interweaving facts and fiction, mingling real characters with fabricated ones. In Cotton under my Feet, he surfaces the revealing clues he found while excavating the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. Raad links and interlaces moments from his personal life with the Cold War, the history of slavery, the American Civil War, the writings of Jalal Toufic and the 1992 United States men’s Olympic basketball team. And although one can visit the exhibition without the walkthrough-performance, Two Drops per Heartbeat proves to be key for the visitor to unlock the meaning of the works presented in Cotton under my Feet. Two Drops per Heartbeat is Raad’s adaptation of a central activity of the museum experience, the guided tour, with Raad himself serving as the guide.

After introducing himself as an artist whose engagement with the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum came about after a coincidental encounter with Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza’s only daughter, Raad starts his tour. As a ball in a pinball machine, Raad shoots himself a way through the exhibition spaces in the museum. In his narration, Raad jumps from one subject to another and overloads the visitors with names and dates. As guides do, visitors are invited to take a closer look but once you step closer, Raad goes to another place in the museum to commence a new subject in front of a new artwork. Once you have the feeling Raad is reaching a sort of conclusion, he cuts off the build-up of this process and starts to talk about something else that he encountered while working in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection.

By shaking up the ritual of the guided tour, Two Drops per Heartbeat undermines the confidence in the itinerary shaped and organized by a museum. Raad’s journey through the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection demonstrates how residual and emergent traces remain present in the archive. Its irritatingly fragmented and wondrous experience offers viewers moments to refuse, to contest or to be enchanted by the assertions on the objects of the collection. Opposing the idea of a rational order and coherence of an exhibition, the performance invites them to keep looking around and under things to unlock new meanings in artworks and to unearth untold stories stored in the archive. Raad’s refusal to surrender to the methodic imperatives of the archive turns the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum into a lens through which one can scrutinize in a more adequate way the complexities of our opaque reality.

A third and final example is the work of Ho Rui An. Like Wouters and Raad, Ho injects the same performative dynamism into a collection, refusing the epistemological stability of artefacts and objects stored in archives and presented in exhibitions. As a writer and artist operating at the intersection of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory, Ho probes the ways images are produced, circulate and disappear within the context of globalism. Particularly interesting is Ho’s Asia the Unmiraculous (2018), a work examining the conditions of the 1997 Asian financial crisis in relation to the economic ‘Miracle’, as the rapid economic growth of the Four Asian Tigers was called by the West. The cascading effect of the crisis marked the end of the East Asian Miracle and exposed states’ inability to regulate the forces of globalization and fend off the influence of international actors such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). By exploring the way this so-called Asian capitalism is represented in philosophy, colonial archives and Hollywood cinema Ho investigates and unpacks “the racialized imaginaries of the East and the West that defined discourses around the rise of Asian nation-states in a neoliberal world order” (Ditzig, 2).

As the outcome of two years of research across Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia, Asia the Unmiraculous consists of an installation and a lecture-performance. The installation features fourteen posters showing enlarged photos borrowed from other media, for example, a cover of Time magazine or stills from the Hollywood films Entrapment and Mission: Impossible III. Designed in the style of real estate listings, these posters show key instances of the imagery of the rise of the Four Asian Tigers as they were depicted in the West. In the centre of the installation, typical corporate furniture is placed: leather seats and a table with a selection of books and magazines on the Asian Miracle, written between the sixties and the nineties. On top of the table, a levitated model of a hand is floating, which refers to Adam Smith’s notion of the ‘invisible hand’ of the free-market economy. The installation’s setup mimics the lobby of a big corporation, a shrine to exhibit the company’s achievements. Asia the Unmiraculous is, however, not a celebration but a critical survey of the way the so-called invisible hand of the free-market economy has become more and more visible.

The corporate aesthetics of the installation is also echoed in the second mode of presentation of Asia the Unmiraculous: the lecture-performance. Performed in a space with the same corporate look and feel, Ho’s lecture-performance is staged as a TED Talk, “a capitalist form of the magic show that presents messianic narratives for the productive consumer to realize their best potential” (Ditzig 2020: 3). Ho’s lecture opens with video footage from a large ship entering the Port of Piraeus. Since 2016, the Chinese state-owned shipping group COSCO has acquired a 67 per cent stake in Greece’s most important economic engine. The busiest port of the Mediterranean has now become China’s most important entry point into Europe, as a part of the major Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initiated by the Chinese state in 2013. Expanding on these recent economic and political developments, Ho seizes these new corridors between Europe and Asia to reflect on how historians and philosophers have been thinking about Asia. By confronting ideas and statements on Asia by Herodotus, Hegel and Marx with China’s current transcontinental ambitions, Ho reframes certain historical events and the Western-monitored writing on these histories, attesting to the persistence of imperialist legacies. Ho’s polyphonic narrative draws on theories of history, economy, philosophy and media studies and establishes wavering connections with the same images presented as posters in the exhibition space.

As in Raad’s Cotton under my Feet, insights into Ho’s research and reflections on the exhibited images are indispensable for the viewers to follow his lines of thought. This explains why Ho produced a video registration of the lecture-performance as an integral part of the installation version of Asia the Unmiraculous. Seated in one of the leather seats one watches the lecture-performance as if it is a commercial or an instruction video.

Both Raad’s and Ho’s performances function as an inherent part of the exhibition and cannot be reduced to mere clarification of what is put on display. On the contrary, the choice to expand on the exhibition and its topics in such a performative way responds to a desire to address reflections that cannot be compressed into one object. It expresses the urge to cope with loose ends and all-too-complex hypotheses that do not fit in one single space. As Ho clarifies, the lecture “is not the medium in which I express whether I’m for or against something. It’s more a space for reflection, speculation and grappling with uncertainty” (which comes with dealing with such an amount of gathered research material) (Ho 2018).

Tentative concluding thoughts

In my view and experience, all these projects embody an essayistic attitude towards both content and medium. Despite their differences, what these works showcase is how engaging with archives provokes uncertainties, disagreements, failure, wonder, doubt, moments of epiphany, and frustration. By making the audience part of their essayistic journey, the form of the exhibition or the museum as an institution is demystified as a place where preservation, consolidation, and stability reign. The form of the essay can help to think about different approaches and new rituals to encounter the challenges the engagement with problematic collections and artworks provoke.

As philosopher Bart Verschaffel notes, the kind of thinking that grounds an essay ‘consists of picking up, preserving, collecting and waiting, until a constellation through images or words emerges’ (11). Hereby, Verschaffel continues, the essay’s ‘bottom layer is a heterogeneous, disorderly carpet of text fragments and memories that incites a number of questions. What is a collection about? What kind of understanding lies in bringing objects together? And what can be added to this collection by the essayist while wandering through it’ (11)?

In the works of Wouters, Raad and Ho, one witnesses how this essayistic gesture unfolds while going through a vast collection of objects, images, events and ideas. By appropriating the codes and conventions of the museum they start a speculative investigation: they try to unearth stories and meanings forgotten and ignored by dominant institutional narratives. Museums give shape and presence to the past and define the space where a ritual encounter with the past takes place. By narrating, performing and visualizing the fragile and always discontinuous process of collecting, Wouters, Raad and Ho instigate a new ritual of encountering the past. As a viewer one is tasked to weigh, verify or test what the artists in their essayistic approach propose as a possible itinerary through the exhibition and, by extension, through the past. One is made aware of the doubts, uncertainties and hesitations that come with the encounter with what is contained in the archive. Being transparent on these issues encourages the viewer to remain open to different meanings. While the essayist takes the reader through his process of thinking on paper, Raad and Ho take the viewer through their process of encounter and thinking in the exhibition space.

Exploring Wouters’, Raad’s and Ho’s work in terms of the essay is not a plea to embed such performances in every exhibition. Instead, this text considers these performances as a possible mode of what curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung describes as “curatorialization”, a way of ‘vivifying’ the process before, during and after the act of display, which expresses “a deep sense of care of the audience at the disposition of the curator”(50). Ndikung uses DJing as an analogy to exemplify this notion of curatorialization. As soon as a DJ notices that the dance floor has come to a standstill, the DJ needs to react to catch the attention of his dancers to keep them on the move. With their intervention in the exhibition, Wouters, Raad and Ho are the first to step back on the dance floor. Their solitary dancing is contagious and attracts people again to the dance floor. By doing so both the artists and the visitors go beyond the inwardness of self-reflection towards a form of speculation. Such a mutual engagement with an exhibition can help to think about different approaches and new rituals to encounter the challenges the engagement with collections provoke.

Note: The first version of this text – titled “Exhibitions in Polarizing Times. Repurposing the Essay-Exhibition” – was presented at the PhD Seminar Art and Polarization, organized by research cluster IMAGE of LUCA School of Arts, Campus Ghent on the 16th of May 2024.

Cited works