Proposing a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions.

This volume gathers and expands upon the results of the research project "Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions," held at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, and proposes a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of art institutions. It undertakes a transdisciplinary history at the nexus of art history, science studies, and philosophy, exploring the role the exhibition played in the construction of the conceptual categories of modernity, and outlines a historiographical model that conceptualizes the exhibition as both an aesthetic and an epistemic site.

Contributors

Etienne Chambaud, Elitza Dulguerova, Anselm Franke, Tristan Garcia, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Yuk Hui, Pierre Huyghe, Sami Khatib, Jeremy Lecomte, Stéphane Lojkine, Rafael Mandressi, Vincent Normand, Peter Osborne, Filipa Ramos, Juliane Rebentisch, João Ribas, Pamela Rosenkranz, Anna-Sophie Springer, Lucy Steeds, Olivier Surel, Etienne Turpin, Kim West, Charles Wolfe

Vincent Normand is an art historian, writer, and occasional curator. He teaches at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, where he codirected the research project Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions (2015-17). He is codirector and coeditor of the research platform and journal Glass Bead. He has curated exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; LABOR, Mexico City; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; and elsewhere.

Lucy Steeds is Reader in Art Theory and Exhibition History at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. She is coeditor of The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice? and How Institutions Think (both published by the MIT Press).

Filipa Ramos is editor-in-chief of art-agenda and a Lecturer in Experimental Film at Kingston University and Moving Image at Central Saint Martins, London. She is the author of Lost and Found: Crisis of Memory in Contemporary Art (2009).

Vincent Normand is an art historian, writer, and occasional curator. He teaches at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, where he codirected the research project Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions (2015-17). He is codirector and coeditor of the research platform and journal Glass Bead. He has curated exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; LABOR, Mexico City; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; and elsewhere.

Anna-Sophie Springer, an independent exhibition maker, is the director of K. Verlag, a publishing imprint and curatorial-editorial platform based in Berlin and Toronto.

Etienne Turpin is a philosopher and the founding director of anexact office, a design research practice based in Jakarta and Berlin.

Tristan Garcia is a philosopher and writer. He codirected the research project Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions at ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne (2015-17). His academic publications include: Form and Object: A Treatise on Things and The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession. In 2008 he won the Prix de Flore for his first novel: Hate: A Romance.

Yuk Hui is a philosopher based in Berlin and the author of On the Existence of Digital Objects and Recursivity and Contingency.

Anselm Franke has been Head of Visual Arts and Film at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) since 2013.

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London. Editor of the journal Radical Philosophy, he is the author of The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde.