Exhibitions Have a History. Selected texts

Dagmar Svatošová

Exhibitions Have a History. Selected texts

The book Exhibitions Have a History offers a Czech readership selected translations of texts by well known and lesser known authors representing the basis of the discourse of the discipline of exhibition histories. The focus is on the grammar of exhibitions, which has become an essential interpretative tool in contemporary art history. Dagmar Svatošová’s introductory text sketches the general features of this new scholarly discipline. The three main chapters – The Exhibition as Medium, Trajectories of Exhibition Histories and The Curatorial Turn – illustrate the specific directions taken by research into exhibition histories. The first addresses in general terms the fundamental question of what an exhibition is and how it can be understood today as a medium, as a specific cultural form or genre of modern art determined by time and place. The second chapter traces the particular trajectories and ways in which these temporary exhibitory representations of art are historicised and inscribed in the updated narratives of its history. The final chapter examines the temporally contingent development of the new profession of curator, which since the end of the 1960s has gradually established itself within the art establishment and acquired a position as one of the most important elements of exhibition histories. Over the past few decades, the discipline of exhibition histories has stood at the intersection of art history, curatorship and artistic practice itself. The book offers answers to key questions concerning not only the past, but also the future of exhibition histories in the context of the contemporary post-global world, and can therefore be seen as providing a springboard from which Czech exhibition histories can be written.

Publication date

2024

Publisher

The Research Centre of AVU

ISBN

978-80-88366-79-9

Language

czech, english

Number of pages

213