Free School for Art Theory and Practice

Producing Publics- Making Worlds
Project Exhibitions as Artistic Practice
seminar with Marion von Osten

As opposed to a classical curatorial or academic approach, the “project exhibitions” include people from most diverse fields of knowledge to develop the concept or the realization of the exhibition. The intention is to be able to change subject positions in this temporary context. Theoreticians and artists jointly elaborated theoretical and visual forms of articulation. Alongside the classical strategies of producing a counter-public in the 1970s, the communication format of an exhibition could and can establish new models of the public, of production and distribution. The “project exhibition”, as an artistic practice, inscribes itself in the debates on modern and postmodern art, as it does in political and theoretical discussions and battles. It takes up the demands of feminist positions and gender-theoretical debates in regard to the establishment and empowerment of non-dichotomous subject positions, as well as the questions relating to labor relations and collective authorship. Opposed to the space of art, the ”project exhibition” unambiguously takes a stand in not illustrating a theme but instead developing its own theses, methods and formats, establishing a discourse, a practice that radically questions the space of art and the regime of representation linked to it. By doing so, the “project exhibition” creates a counter-public by building a counter-narration in the making.

tovább…