This research cluster focuses on Exhibition Culture. It investigates the art of exhibiting and contextualizing artworks, art practices and artefacts from different periods and cultural provenances. It understands exhibition making as an ever-evolving anthropological phenomenon of cultural commonality. Artistic and curatorial practices are in this research cluster approached as dialogues in the making; a crossover of formulations, ideas and concepts in material and conceptual form. 

The cluster is open to all artistic and curatorial research that introduces new approaches to exhibition culture with a particular line of inquiry into transhistorical continuities and/or intermedial crossings in artistic and cultural expression and presentation.

It is embedded in the Intermedia Research Unit of LUCA School of Arts.

In our approach the artist, the curator, the art-institute, the display and the displayed are studied as equal parts and inseparable sub-elements of what we want to call the culture of exhibitions. The “construct” of an exhibition is a complex maze of many levels with various players, ambitions and perspectives. It is shaped and reshaped through the practice of dialogues between these different agents. Artistic concepts, presentation methodologies, museological frames, collections, architectural contexts and exhibition narratives have in common that they are historically rooted and searching for a contemporary dimension.

Can certain exhibitions, artistic positions and museological presentations be conducive to the research for transhistorical continuities? Can artworks, artefacts of interest show the way in which certain forms and ideas hold throughout time beyond historical determinations and across media? What specific strategies are used and can be developed in creating exhibitions to express the quality and relevance of works of art? What (new) exhibition culture and framework do curators and art institutes develop? What is the (active) role of the artist in this debate historically and today?

Nicola Setari
Richard Venlet
Ans Mertens

dr. Nicola Setari and dr. Richard Venlet
LUCA - Campus Sint-Lukas Brussel
Paleizenstraat 70
B-1030 Brussel
nicola.setari@luca-arts.be
richard.venlet@luca-arts.be