Curatorial Challenges Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating Routledge Research in Art Museums and Exhibitions Series

Curatorial Challenges investigates the challenges faced by curators in contemporary society and explores which practices, ways of thinking, and types of knowledge production curating exhibitions could challenge. Bringing together international curators and researchers from the fields of art and cultural history, the book provides new research and perspectives on the curatorial process and aims to bridge the traditional gap between theoretical and academic museum studies and museum practices.

The book focuses on exhibitions as a primary site of cultural exchange and argues that, as highly visible showcases, producers of knowledge, and historically embedded events, exhibitions establish and organize meanings of art and cultural heritage. Temporary exhibitions continue to increase in cultural significance and yet the traditional role of the museum as a Bildung institution has changed. As exhibitions gain in significance, so too do curatorial strategies. Arguing that new research is needed to help understand these changes, the book presents original research that explores how curatorial strategies inform both art and cultural history museums in contemporary society. The book also investigates what sort of critical, transformative, and perhaps even conservative, potential can be traced in exhibition cultures.

Curatorial Challenges fosters innovative interdisciplinary exchange and brings new insights to the field of curatorial studies. As such, it should be of great interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students engaged in the study of curatorial practice, museum studies, the making of exhibitions, museum communication, and art history.

List of Figures

List of contributors

Introduction: Thinking and Doing Exhibitions

Anne Folke Henningsen, Anne Gregersen, and Malene Vest Hansen

Part I.Curating within the Changing Role of Museums as Bildung Institutions

1. Curatorship as Bildungsroman: Or, From Hamlet to Hjelmslev

Donald Preziosi

2. Curating the Nude in Istanbul: Some Curatorial Challenges

Ahu Antmen

3. Curating the Dead Body between Medicine and Culture

Karin Tybjerg

4. Fashion Curation: Unpacking a New Discipline and Practice

Marie Riegels Melchior

5. Exhibition Addresses: The Production of Publics in Exhibitions on Colonial History

Mathias Danbolt

6. Multi-Sited Curating as a Critical Mode of Knowledge Production

Sabine Dahl Nielsen

Part II - Exhibitions and/as Research

7. Curating and Research: An Uneasy Alliance

Simon Sheikh

8. Exhibitions as Research, Curator as Distraction

Peter Bjerregaard

9. Curating a Mild Apocalypse. Researching Anthropocene Ecologies through Analytical Figures

Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup

10. Curating experimental entanglements

Adam Bencard, Louise Whiteley and Caroline Heje Thon

11. The forgotten and the forgettable: the making of The World Goes Pop and Other Stories

Flavia Frigeri

12. Looters, Smugglers, and Collectors: Rethinking Models of Ownership Research and How to Mediate It through the Form of the Exhibition

Tone Hansen

Part III - Revisiting the Past and Challenging Canons

13. Multiple Modernisms: Curating the Postwar Era for the Present

Kristian Handberg

14. Contested Paradise: Exhibiting Images from the Former Danish West Indies

Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer

15. Against the Grain of Neutralization: Exhibiting the Documentary as a Curatorial Production of Subjective Knowledge

Susanne Neubauer

16. Innovative, Polemical, Dogmatic: The Case of Soviet Experimental Museum Displays in 1930–1933

Masha Chlenova

Concluding remarks

Anne Folke Henningsen, Anne Gregersen and Malene Vest Hansen

Index

Malene Vest Hansen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Copenhagen.

Anne Folke Henningsen is Associate Professor of Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen.

Anne Gregersen is Curator at the J.F. Willumsens Museum and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen.