Museum Off Museum Museum Off Museum !"# !

"" Doreen Mende Doreen Mende

I would like to return to the question as
to what making an exhibition means,
and what that can do for us in the era of
globalization. Basically, our present era
is characterized by two principles: rstly,
an excess of information regulated via
standardized distribution systems that
jeopardize and conceal alternative ways
to include the vast variety of processes
for generating knowledge.
!
Secondly,
and more relevant to the following re-
ections, there has been a profound re-
ordering process after the world-fractur-
ing events around 1989 (and one still
ongoing), which has re-shued the
global relations between societies, econ-
omies and cultures. Te question of dis-
tribution in capital and data,
$
and the
geopolitical re-ordering processes both
have an inevitable eect on what we do
in the arena of contemporary art. Tere-
fore, the question above undoubtedly
and it is one prompting us to re-think
what the exhibition is and what it can
do for us; to speculate in line with the
geopolitical imperatives today about a
multi-layered spatiality within the space
of exhibiting. Tus, the exhibitions for-
mat itself its limits, potentialities and
requirements must be redrafted. With
what is a profound change in the condi-
tions governing the exhibition, there-
fore, consequences must necessarily en-
sue for our various activities as artists,
curators, theorists, architects, designers,
writers, lmmakers, researchers, and ex-
hibition-goers.
In other words, our consideration of
what the space of exhibiting is and
what it does needs to embrace the fact
that exhibiting processes result from a
geopolitical exigency: to make some-
thing public means not only to put
something on public display, but also
to displace places. Te wording is not
mine. Jacques Derrida speaks here of
the topolitical
"
that ensues when the
link between the political and the local
is interrupted and cut o. Any element
on public display evinces a predeliction
for travel, which takes any element des-
tined for public display from one place
to the other by crossing borders, cus-
toms controls and time zones. Let me
make clear: by using the term ele-
ment, I wish to step out of the para-
digm of the exhibit (the material nal
product of an artistic process) in order
to draw our attention to a wider range
of apparent formations and formula-
tions, as they have been discussed re-
cently through concepts such as ab-
stract things and neomaterialism
#
.
By the time it arrives in the exhibition
space, the element will have lost any
claim on originality deriving from its
actual origin. We might be able to ver-
ify the location, time and author of
production (and usually curators do
know about all this). However, each el-
ements arrival on public display may
add a further layer contributing to the
concept of an unlimited originality.
Tus, the act of making something
public inevitably erases the claim for
any originary origin. Each time
something arrives, anywhere at all, it
will insist, therefore, on unpacking its
own conditions for how it is to appear.
Trough such a loss of any possibility
of claiming the originary origin,
there is indicated one crucial compo-
nent in our re-thinking process towards
the exhibition.
Such a situation arises when exhibition
practice is at stake and in play, but it
means something more complex than
just putting things on display. Yet, this
is where we are: Can we conceive of the
exhibition space beyond the capitalist
paradigm that operates so relentlessly to
separate production and presentation
(Marx would say: consumption)? Since
we live in a period of capitalist real-
ism, as the British blogger and theorist
Mark Fisher so remarkably analyzed it
in 2009, shortly after the global nan-
cial crisis, I suggest making use of Der-
ridas proposal of the topolitical, as
mentioned above. In order to return to
connotes that we have reached a limit in
what we have commonly understood as
the exhibition.
%
In times when international curators
can y easily from one place in the
world to another, when residency pro-
grammes take artists to remote or unfa-
miliar places for a few months to pro-
duce a work that somehow connects
to their new experiences, when biennal-
es foster within contemporary art an
economy of internationality which
may stand in paradoxical contrast to the
particularity of artistic practice in sup-
port of political and social struggles, and
when European institutions such as Tate
Modern in London extend their collec-
tions with newdepartments for non-west-
ern contemporary art we cannot deny
that there is a profound geopolitical exi-
gency deeply aecting artistic production,
our means of articulation and condi-
tions of practice, namely the space and
the exhibition, it is valuable to link such
spatio-geographic concern with that
which Derrida goes on to frame as a de-
sire for exappropriation:
Tis mirage, that the addressee
might reappropriate what reaches
him (or her), is a fantasy. But this is
no reason to abandon the addressee
to passivity and not to militate for all
forms, summary or sophisticated, of
the right of response, right of selec-
tion, right of interception, right of
intervention. [] what I have pro-
posed to call exappropriation []
Tis is in any case, what opens the
eld to the desire to reappropriate
oneself, and to the war between ap-
propriations.
&
Derrida allows us to speculate about the
consequences when we intend to push
the conventional concept of space to-
wards spatiality in exhibiting. Te sen-
tences above speak of a seemingly vio-
lent constellation of appropriations,
which comes into existence when each
addressee insists on his or her particular
approach to what is being exposed on
public display. Avoiding the category
viewer here enables the erasure of dis-
ciplined hierarchies, which art history,
and also exhibition history as a new dis-
cipline in such studies, usually wish to
distinguish precisely.
'
Te addressee can
be an artist, a curator, or anyone who
commits him- or herself to the idea of
the exhibition.
(
Furthermore, and quite
crucially, the addressee is the one who
takes up the right to respond, to se-
lect, to intercept and to intervene.
When we consider the exhibition from
this perspective, we see that the address-
ee has never been passive. Tere will be
neither an awareness of selectivity, oper-
ating simply as a spectatorial critique,
nor will the constellation remain a theo-
retical exercise for the sake of theory or
rely on the concept of art mediation
(Kunstvermittlung). Te confrontation
is one-to-one, an immediate encounter
within the very space of exhibiting, far
from contemplation and sublimation.

In the last analysis, exappropriation re-
quires, above all, both appropriation
and expropriation of that which is ex-
posed. In other words, any act of appro-
priation entails the expropriation of
meaning and, perhaps even inadvertent-
ly, of copyrights and intellectual proper-
ty. At the same time, expropriation could
also be read as claiming the rights to the
means of production. We might well al-
ready understand the complexity, in-
cluding the troubling degrees of violence
and the possibilities of misunderstand-
ing that come with the act of making
public, i.e., the exhibition. I would like
to connect such complexity with a prac-
tice that cross-reads the double activity
of to display/to displace to deem it a
displaycing practice. And secondly,
such a double gesture within the work of
exappropriation projects its consequences
back onto the one who appropriates: to
reapproprate oneself. Tis sounds like
an exhausting task for anyone who de-
clares him- or herself to be the addressee.
DISPLAYCING
PRACTICES
from space
to spatiality
in exhibiting
DOREEN MENDE
WHAT ARE WE TO THINK ABOUT THE
CURRENT STATE OF THE EXHIBITION?
HERMAN ASSELBERGHS
Capsular, 2006
23 min, various stills
Courtesy Auguste Orts, Brussels
Copyright Herman Asselberghs
I NTERPOLI EREN
ERI C BAUDELAI RE
The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao
Adachi and 27 Years without Images, 2012
Expanded installation
Armand Marco, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Jean-Luc Godard
in the Baqa refugee camp in Jordan 1970 during
the shooting of Until Victory: Working and
Thinking Methods of the Palestinian Revolution
(realized with Anne-Marie Mivielle as Ici et
Ailleurs four years later).
LAURA HORELLI
The Terrace, 2011
24 min, film/video
YAZAN KHALI LI
On Love and other Landscapes, 2011
Book project
46.4 x 32cm
Museum Off Museum Museum Off Museum !"' !"& Doreen Mende Doreen Mende
At the same time, it provides the ground
for a radical reinvention of ones own po-
sition in relation to ones own surround-
ings.
At this point, I can already hear the
screams of outrage from some readers,
who would want to intervene vehe-
mently against such a proposal by
mounting an elaborate critique of neo-
liberalism. But let me de-escalate the
conict even before it gets properly
started by pointing out that one of the
central qualities of revolutionary dis-
courses in the liberation struggles of en-
tire societies, just as much as in avant-
garde movements of the arts on a global
scale, has been dened in terms of the
endurance of an ever-creative self-de-
struction and constant reinvention.
)
In
spatial terms, the addressees rights radi-
cally distort a view of space as a smooth
entity. Derrida speaks of a war of ap-
propriations. Along the lines of libera-
tion struggles and the hope for an avant-
garde, I propose to connect the term
war more closely with a struggle to
gain and keep the rights of response, se-
lection and intervention on an absolute-
ly equal footing within the exhibition
space, than to connect this war with a
territorial battle per se. In other words,
the conict does not emerge from de-
fending ones own territory, which
means, in relation to our eld of action,
that it does not necessarily ask whether
you are a curator or an artist. Rather, the
conict takes o from uneven geogra-
phies they do not produce a single,
smooth surface and they are made in-
telligible through their own imaginative
geographies, as Derek Gregory suggests
we should think about the colonial pres-
ent.
!*
(It would require another essay to
unpack the multiple and challenging
implications that the notion of war
opens up here. I amnot primarily think-
ing of projects such as A Guiding
Light (2010) by Liam Gillick and An-
ton Vidokle, which considers a discus-
sion of the exhibition as a battleeld
through an excessively self-reexive lens.
Instead, to put it as briey as possible in
the frame of this essay: war has become
a permanent condition on a global scale.
Tere is no war without geopolitical en-
tanglements imbedded in conicting
interests on a global scale, a circum-
stance we currently can discern through
the second Geneva conference about the
Syrian situation. Te work by Milica
Tomic, particularly her project Con-
tainer [20042012], unfolds the mech-
anisms of the permanent global war ex-
plicitly through a process-related artistic
practice aimed at promoting an under-
standing of the network for the global
production of violence.
!!
)
All these reections proceed from years
of research, on the one hand, into dis-
play strategies and exhibition histories
of the post-war and contemporary peri-
od of European modernity, and on the
other, into the modes of production of
international solidarity amidst a so-
cialist web of relations during the
Cold War period, that was enacted
through the means of producing and
publishing photography. I have written
Mosquera) remake Western culture
and thus be valid throughout the entire
world.
!"
Tis means, contemporary art
today emerges from spatio-geographic
relations on global scale that have re-
drafted the world order, diluting clear-
cut divisions between East and West as
much as between South and North. Its
absolutely time, therefore, to re-think
the space of the exhibition fromprecise-
ly such a geopolitical perspective, at a
time when contemporary / international
art has become one of the most impor-
tant areas of globalization. While the
geopolitical proximities during the Cold
War period resided in concepts of inter-
nationality and internationalisms, today
we live in an era of globalization. Tis is
when spatiality enters the space of the
exhibition, i.e., when space exceeds its
Euclidean measurements and links up
with a set of relations that have existed
and (might still) exist on a global scale.
In exhibition and exhibiting, much still
remains to emerge from the movement
of space towards spatiality.
N.B. Te images chosen here propose
an open archive around this essay. Each
image is a hyperlink to further reading.
! Cf. Maria Hlavajova et al., On Knowledge
Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art
(Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2008).
$ Globalization takes place only in capital and data.
Furthermore: No specicity at the metropolitan end,
only uniformization-data and capital. Everything else
is damage control. In An Aesthetic Education in the
Era of Globalization, ed. Gayatri Spivak (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
% For the sake of the argument, let us consider the
exhibition from its etymological roots, which lie in the
Latin exhibere, compounded of ex for out and
habere for to hold. CF. exhibition search, accessed
January 23, 2014, www.etymonline.com/index.php.
Such a spatial activity asks after the means and
instruments to put something out there, regardless of
what this is. I do not dismiss practicalities at all, but I
hope that the following text adds a broader dimension
to the question of spatial practice.
" All Derrida quotes taken from: Jacques Derrida, Acts
of Memory: Topolitics and Teletechnology, in
Echographies of Television, ed. Jacques Derrida and
Bernard Stiegler (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 5667.
# Cf. Sven Ltticken, Attending to Abstract Tings,
New Left Review 54 (London, 2008), 101122;
Joshua Simon, Neomaterialism (Berlin/New York:
Sternberg Press, 2013).
& Jacques Derrida, Acts of Memory: Topolitics and
Teletechnology, in Echographies of Television, ed.
Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler (Cambridge:
Polity, 2002), 58.
' Cf. the conference Die Kunst auszustellen.
Knstlerische Positionen und kuratorische Konzepte,
1945 bis heute, Leipzig, December 24, 2011.
Furthermore, see also Afteralls publications series
Exhibition Histories.
( Exhibiting is that what we share: artists and curators,
lmmakers, writers, lecturers, pianists, singers,
gogo-dancers, democrats and terrorists, theorists,
militants, revolutionaries, designers, TV-programmers,
magazine editors, traders, shop owners and protesters,
statesmen, illegal street vendors and brokers, lawyers,
face-bookers
) Here I am paraphrasing the rst sentence of Okwui
Enwezors remarkable essay, Coalition Building:
Black Audio Film Collective and Transnational
Postcolonialism, in Te Ghosts of Songs, ed. Kodwo
Eshun and Anjalika Sagar (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2007), 106.
!* Cf. Derek Gregory, Te Colonial Present:
Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2004), 255.
!! Cf. Milica Tomic, accessed January 23, 2014,
milicatomic.wordpress.com/works/ container.
!$ Cf. Doreen Mende, From the Desert. Te Itinerant:
When Exhibiting Turns Its Back Against Itself,
Manifesta Journal, accessed January 23, 2014, www.
manifestajournal.org/online-residencies/
doreen-mende/desert.
!% Terry Smith, A Questionnaire on Te
Contemporary: 32 Responses, in OCTOBER, #130
(Fall 2009), 51.
!" Ibid.
elsewhere
!$
about the work by the East-
German photographer Horst Sturm,
who collaborated with revolutionaries
of the Palestinian liberation movement
when he travelled as a delegate to vari-
ous places in the Middle East and North
Africa throughout the 1980s to work
there closely together with members of
the movements who had become pho-
tographers after the armed struggle. Be-
side the fact that the research engaged in
complicated political questions, it also
helped me to unpack a highly contradic-
tory dilemma within exhibiting, and
one that emerges from the split between
production and presentation: Because
the production conditions of these pho-
tographs, taken in the 1980s during
rather informal educational gatherings
and existing today in Sturms personal
image archive, do, to a large extent, con-
ict with the exhibition space as an Eu-
clidian-measured entity. Photography
courses brought the various Palestinian
participants and the East-German pho-
tographer together, so that the images
are products of social relations imbed-
ded in a political cause: Walks in the
streets of Beirut, visits to the militants
camps, informal dinners, and clandes-
tine encounters with the movements
leaders contribute as much to the pro-
duction of the photographs as the work
in the laboratory, the development of
the lm, and the selection the right
images for publishing purposes. How-
ever, as we discussed above, there is no
such thing as an originary origin, i.e.,
it is simply impossible to show the pro-
duction conditions as they were. Te
transfer of the archival photographs into
the world of contemporary art, however,
would displace them not only in time
and space but also with regard to their
ideologically and politically informed
framework (the socialist project on a
global scale collapsed around 1989. Te
GDR does not exist anymore, while Pal-
estine still waits to become a state). It
turned out to be valuable to approach
the concern for such geopolitical issues
in exhibiting by including the profound
paradigm shift of spatial / political con-
stellations on a global scale after the
world-fracturing events around 1989,
i.e., after the breakdown of the old bi-
nary world order (capitalism/ socialism).
Terry Smith clearly observes that the af-
ter-eects of 1989 have had, and still
have, a great impact on the movements
of contemporary art, what he describes
as a transnational turn:
the transnational turn has generated a
plethora of art shaped by local, national,
anti-colonial, and independent values
(diversity, identity, critique). It has enor-
mous international currency through
travellers, expatriates, new markets, and
especially biennales. Hybrids of all kinds
appeared.
!%
Geopolitical changes in the years around
1989 opened up a degree of access to
each other between societies closed o
for a generation at least, if not for two.
Te desire arose to create and dissemi-
nate a contemporary art that would (in
the words of Cuban critic Geraldo
SAMUEL STEVENS
Atlantropa,2009
19:15 min
Copyright Samuel Stevens
MI LI CA TOMI C
Container: Photography by other
means, 20042012
Performance lecture summer 2012
Photo: Arthur Zalewski, 2012
TRAVELLI NG COMMUNI QU
Durational exhibition collaboration
project Installation view fall 2013
Copyright Armin Linke, Doreen Mende,
Milica Tomic et al.
KATRI N MAYER
Abers, 2011
Print project and installation
THE OTOLI TH GROUP
Thoughtform, 2011
Exhibition project
Photo: Copyright MACBA Barcelona
and the artists
CATHLEEN SCHUSTER
Not a waste, 2013
Essay film, 10 min
Installation view, Berlin
Copyright Cathleen Schuster
ABDERRAHMANE SI SSAKO
Rostov-Luanda, 1997
90 min