Theater, Garden, Bestiary

The history of exhibitions is currently undergoing renewed interest. While today the "medium" of exhibition is a producer of specific discourses, and while it offers new practices a stage on which to emerge, it has also become the nexus of numerous institutional neo-positivisms relating to the ontological designation ‘art’. The exhibition, in the search for its reflexive forms (as in the quest for its own modernism) seems to become a genre in its own right. By distancing itself from today's flurry of studies related to curating, this research project will draft a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of artistic institutions. The research project Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions stems from the wish to consider the exhibition as a genre, and to question its place in an expanded geography of borders and conceptual divides that have historically structured the space of art, and which continue to underlie its situation today. Its aim is to consider anew the genre of exhibition, by grounding it both in the history of modernism and in modernity as a whole, that is, in what one may call the anthropological matrix of modernity: its ontological separations, its epistemic divisions, its political economy, its sense of the negative.