footnote (II)

Could someone consciousness be a work of art?

Why the exhibition cannot happen in few places at the same time?

Can the space be a pop song ?

Where does the work of art start and end?

Why the work of art has to be two or three dimensional?

Where does the fiction begin?

Why the story cannot happen before or after?

Did you do something nice today?

* * *

I’m putting things in the space. Some of them were already there before (similarly as walls and concrete floor painted grey). And now they exists only as afterimage, the context of a frame a substitute to reality. Others appear over the show. They are invisible or non-existent (call it imaginary if you want). Some of them you might have already seen or imagined but their image is very obscure in your mind, like a souvenir from a dream. The others you’ve never seen but they might have astonished you in the future. They lie unnoticed or you can trip over them. What happens to a dream when you stumble on the stone? External realities exist independent of observation. Take the imagine thing in your hand and turn it. 

 

 

 

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.