OASE-contributo (Elena Montanari, Gennaro Postiglione)

Revista de História da Arte, 2019

The Revista de História da Arte n. 14 addresses the “exhibition” not only as an object of study but mainly as a prolific problem. This theme is here covered through various lenses, underlining how the exhibition is a vital topic to many interdisciplinary and interrelated research fields that deal with museums, art, culture and diplomacy.

in C. Ricci (ed.) Starting from Venice. Studies on the Biennale, Et. al. Edizioni, Milan, 2010

It has become increasingly common to claim that the history of modern and contemporary art is best grasped as a history of exhibitions. While such an approach has obvious advantages, particularly for curators, its implications are less clear. How might it differ from accounts that privilege artists, movements, mediums, or contexts? What sort of critical, aesthetic, and analytical criteria should structure such an undertaking? How can a history of exhibitions avoid the pitfalls of canonization? And what relevance might pre-existing models of curating retain for contemporary practices? This seminar will investigate such questions by collectively analyzing a selection of test cases drawn from the history of exhibition-making. Our work will be directed by the following objectives: to trace important developments in the evolution of exhibition forms and curatorial practices; to register the ways in which these histories have conditioned recent artistic production and exhibition making; and to critically assess the rhetoric of the art exhibition as a form of public communication. The course is divided into three sections. The first of these, entitled “Models,” surveys important moments in the development of the exhibition in Western modernity, ranging from the private collection, the state museum, and the salon to the modernist musem, the travelling exhibition, and the international biennial; it also attends to avant-garde activities in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The second section, “Countermodels,” seeks to trace some of the many ways in which experimental art and exhibition-making positioned itself against these historical precedents in the decades following 1945. While this section will cover such influential museum exhibitions as “Information” and “When Attitudes Become Form,” it will place equal emphasis on gallery shows, demonstrations, para-museal installations, and work in distributed media. It will further examine developments at the periphery of established North Atlantic centers. The last section, “Altermodels,” engages contemporary developments that mean to further reinvent the exhibition. Here we will look closely at the complex transformations grouped together under the term “globalization,” before examining recent tendencies in durational and social production, closing with an evaluation of the changing status of curatorial labor.

ICAMT is one of the first International Committees of ICOM, listed in ICOM News on October, 1st, 1948. Since its official date of creation (1949), ICAMT is the Committee in which information, best practices and ideas come together with aspects from the architecture, the techniques of the museum buildings and the techniques of exhibitions. Nowadays ICAMT provides a forum for communication between its members and other interested persons by organizing conferences and workshops, by the website and newsletters, and by other means of communication. We are always happy with and proud of our Committee members. For 2020, we count 615 individual and 21 institutional members all over the world. In addition to the Annual Conference we are just launching, one of our plans for 2020 is to present ICOM and ICAMT on "Regeneration 20|30", a global platform which groups together businesses, institutions, and individuals involved in a collaborative effort. Built around three strictly interdependent pillars: Regenerative Economy, Climate Action and World Happiness, it is an economic, social, and environmental endeavor with a time span from 2020 to 2030. On October 15-16, 2020 there will be two days of digital and physical (in Parma, Italy) meetings to present the coalition to the world, globally involving stakeholders in the project. ICAMT will be represented in the section World Happiness, with the topic "Museums and Happiness". ICAMT often collaborates with ICOM other committees. In November this year, ICAMT will take part in the 2020 Forum for ICOM International Committees, organized by ICEE and ICOM LAC. The Forum aims to create a space for exchanging ideas, networking, and collaboration among ICOM members in Latin America. During the Forum, ICOM International Committees will introduce themselves and promote their most relevant activities or projects with the purpose of engaging and attracting new members from National Committees in Latin America and the Caribbean. We are happy with our partners. ICAMT and Politecnico di Milano, within their competences, intend to establish an ongoing collaboration aiming to work on joint projects focused on strengthening of museum institutions. ICAMT is glad to cooperate with ICOM Italy's working groups on "accessibility" and "exhibition fittings recycling", two important themes for our Committee. These are, in short, our current activities, but ICAMT has many plans for the near future. We very much hope that the pandemic situation will be controlled next year, allowing us to fulfill our projects.

2014

This course explores a range of museological and popular cultural exhibition practices through case studies including fine arts, ethnography, (natural) history, science and technology, national, memorial and children's museums. Throughout the semester we will focus on investigating how contemporary (primarily American) museums and heritage sites have evolved from princely collections, curiosity cabinets, circuses and amusement parks. The overarching theme of the course is to trace the development of modern museological practice in relation to economic, social, technological, scientific, cultural and political changes and how these transformations affected various "cultures of display." Studying the metamorphosis of museums necessarily entails discussion of empowered public audiences, invention and discovery, education as a means to train citizens in morality and the importance of solidifying national, regional, local as well as class and ethno-cultural identities. The growth of commerce and trade in the aftermath of the first and second industrial evolutions in conjunction with widespread European colonialism resulted in new models and venues for the exhibition of new technologies, art, architecture, anthropology, history as well as living and dead human and animal remains. During the course of the semester, we will look at objects, buildings, people, animals and landscapes to think about how their contexts of display have told three-dimensional stories over the course of several centuries, drawing mainly on examples in the United States. We will examine issues such as the relationship of collections and landscapes to identity; the intersection of commerce and culture; and the influence that evolving educational and entertainment practices have had upon museological institutions. We will consider the role of museums and exhibitions in preserving a view of the past and developing an image of progress; and we will discuss how they change in response to the various contexts in which and for which they exist. The basic objectives of this course are: • To become familiar with the origins of the modern museum, from early collecting activities to the development of the museum in the 19th and 20th centuries and into the postmodern present • To explore the relationships between museums and evolutionary theory, ethnology/ethnography, anthropological theories of cultural relativism, archaeology, natural history • To investigate the cultural and political contexts of building ethnographic collections and displays; as well as the relationship between museums and imperialist/colonialist plunder • Analyzing the emergence of the museum as a focus of anthropological and theoretical inquiry and as a subject of ethnography itself • Examining the contemporary role(s) of museums, notably as the museum has become part of the culture industry (e.g., blockbuster exhibitions); political reassessments of museums' "use" and marketing in

Contemporary art exhibits are complex operations that offer a considerable wealth of design knowhow. The many fragile, ephemeral forms concerning them, their importance and what they were to become had already encouraged reflections upon critiques and art theory during the final three decades of the 20th century. A number of useful debates were of great use to the rethinking and reassessment of outfitting areas in order to open up essential regions. These regions were to carefully construct the story of art and critiques; a story which is placed at the crossroads of many stories like an exchange and a dialogue or like the privileged junction of a scenario related to art and its context as well as to places and names, facts and dates.

Curatography, 2023

And so, I was trying to ask the question again, ask it anew, as if it had not been asked before, because the language of the historian was not telling me what I needed to know…-HORTENSE SPILLERS The more possibilities are suggested, the more possibilities exist, the more possibilities are taken in by the imagination, the more the imagination's possibilities are defined, the more the possibility of more possibilities can be recognised. The possibilities of more possibilities lead to the imagination itself, immediately and to me.-Madeline Gins If you have curatorial experiences, you might be familiar with the moment when something happens in the realm of an exhibition-the moment the exhibition transcends to become more than just the sum of individual art works in a specific space or site. Exhibiting is alchemy. Alchemy of all sorts of consciousness and entities-invisible histories, memories and projections into the future that curators, artists, technicians, installers and the beholders bring in; matters, objects, both animate and inanimate; knowledge, space and environment etc.-which dissolve their boundaries and synchronise to become inseparable and indistinguishable as individual beings. In this sense, the exhibition itself is not simply exteriorised memory or experience, or a collection of art works and their contextualisation, but also a specific attentional form, into which social, psychic, collective, and technological instances of un/consciousness are capacitated and merged.

How does one construct the history of exhibitions -forgotten, unwritten, disparate, often lacking in documentation? In what ways might it be a new kind of history, displacing the traditional focus on objects and related critical histories, yet irreducible to the term 'museum studies'? In what ways have exhibitions, more than simple displays and configurations of objects, helped change ideas about art, intersecting at particular junctions with technical innovations, discursive shifts and larger kinds of philosophical investigations, thus forming part of these larger histories? What does it mean to ask such questions in the era of fast-moving celebrity curators, biennials and fairs, digital ways and means, which have taken shape over the last twenty years?

Changing demands of society and the art market have directly shaped exhibition space over the years, leading to its contemporary formal 'crisis': the 'white box' vs. 'building as object,' a rigid dichotomy that poses either the sacrifice of architecture or art at the expense of the other. This essay has found that contemporary trends in the art market have brought about the emergence of several new exhibition strategies, and seeks to evaluate these strategies as a means to move beyond the contemporary 'crisis' of exhibition space. This essay defines exhibition space as the physical setting of a public display of art work, including museums, galleries, fairs, and emerging typologies. The essay will focus on typology as opposed to detail, for the sake of eliciting the most meaningful relationships between exhibition space and the art market. These typologies will be referred to collectively as “exhibition space” throughout the essay, specifying between them only when necessary (the term gallery is often used interchangeably for galleries and museums). This is to promote a cross-sectional analysis of typologies in order to elicit commonalities, and because the developments of these typologies have great overlap. This essay is structured by three main sections: The Historical Development of Exhibition Spaces, Contemporary Exhibition Spaces, and The Future of Exhibition Spaces.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

The transformation of the sustainability models of cities, in the last years, has modified the perception of the economic and political role of arts and, consequently, the expectations of the public sector on cultural institutions. In Italy, the growth of cultural tourism in the main urban centers and art cities has changed the cultural supply models, increasing the emphasis on temporary exhibitions and events. Moreover, the contraction of public resources has induced cultural institutions to develop new forms of collaboration with private organizations in order to negotiate their autonomy. Starting from the Italian scenario, this research describes the activity of eight relevant institutions involved in the organization of exhibitions. The analysis of quantitative and qualitative data will show, in the first part, how these institutions have developed different models as far as their management structure, governance, nature of their offer and relationship with the cultural system as a whole. In this perspective, the second part will be dedicated to the study of a specific exhibition recently held at Palazzo Te in Mantua, analyzing the role that exhibitions have taken in local contexts.