superposition(s): of dispositions, impositions, and other presuppositions

in many ways, i came into this project from a rather ambitious position - well at least initially. when kent first approached me about the project, i had the idea that perhaps there was some way in which my own position - as a relatively new curator at the NUS Museum - could facilitate a different thinking about and around the exhibitionary. this isn't to say that there is a fixed image of what an exhibition should be over at the NUS Museum; but that there are certain modes of working that characterize most of the exhibitions there: the amount of research that goes into every exhibition, an insistence on openness and experimentation, etc. i've always thought that such a mode of working actually functions, perhaps implicitly, as critique of academia and its research market - where research no longer happens as research grants today often require a said expectation of what that research proposal might churn out as its result. (if that should happen, how much of it could be said to be really 'research' given that the results are to a large degree already predetermined.) there is, then, a tendency for exhibitions at the NUS Museum to function less like an anthology of dissertations than a series of exploratory essays which would insist on remaining open-ended.

perhaps something similar is at work here with SUPERPOSITION(S). while decidedly less research-intensive, it remains for me largely experimental. this might sound like an apology for this 'non-exhibition':

when i explained the premise of the show to a friend, she asked if SUPERPOSITION(S) was something of a 'troll show' where nothing happens. maybe she's right. but i wonder too whether such comments presupposes, after all, a certain idea of what an exhibition should be, do or at least look like?

But what if we thought of the exhibition as the site where deeply entrenched ideas and forms can come undone, where the ground on which we stand is rendered unstable? Instead of the 'production of knowledge' so frequently cited in institutional statements of purposes, an exhibition might provoke feelings of irreverence or doubt, or an experience that is at once emotional, sensual, political, and intellectual while being decidedly not predetermined, scripted, or directed by the curator and the institution. (Filipovic 78)

Filipovic here proposes, instead, a kind of negative definition for the exhibition: where it is perhaps much easier to define an exhibition by what it isn't rather than what it is. what i find productive, however, is the irreverence towards 'knowledge production' which Filipovic alludes to. i've been to too many exhibitions where curators would simply speak about the ability of artists to contribute in terms of 'knowledge production' or that (their) exhibitions might be conceived as alternative expressions (if not critiques) of art history, etc.

given that SUPERPOSITION(S) finds itself situated in the premises of an art school, where can we go with this? should we continue to impose on the exhibition an obligation towards 'knowledge production', towards an 'education' for the imagined publics of this institutions? that an exhibition remains fundamentally temporary and transient - that is, the very lightness of its being - might in fact be its saving grace.

Works Cited
Filipovic, Elena. "What is an Exhibition?" Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, ed. Jens Hoffmann. Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2013. 71-81.