Re: Towards ‘Minor’ Histories of Exhibitions and Performances, a two-day workshop, will bring together scholars, museum professionals, curators, artists and students to discuss the methodological challenges of re-exhibiting and recording ‘minor’ exhibitions and performances.
Although the history of exhibitions is a relatively recent field, the literature on the subject is characterised by an emphasis on large-scale exhibitions. By contrast, the present workshop seeks to identify the contours of ‘minor’ histories of exhibitions and performances – that is, a historiography of events that, for various reasons, resist inclusion in grand historical narratives. Of particular concern are the curatorial and editorial strategies upon which contemporary art institutions rely to redisplay/reperform such events.
Chief among these strategies is ‘reactivation’. The notion of reactivation raises compelling questions about the possibility of representing artistic exhibitions and performances that, while deemed historically significant, can afford, or even demand, a certain distance from ‘objective’ recreation. Over the workshop’s two days, other strategies of re-exhibition – including reanimation, reenactment and reprise – will be discussed with reference to contemporary curatorial case studies.
The two-day workshop will take as its starting point the exhibition Celebration of the Body, a complex curatorial experiment organised in 1976 by the conceptual artist IAIN BAXTER& with his then partner Ingrid Baxter (together operating under the name of N.E. Thing Company) at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario…