BiTES

Questioning Exhibit Display. Theories, Forms, Perspectives  

Francesca Castellani, Jérôme Glicenstein, Francesca Zanella eds., Hermann, Paris 2024

This book presents the first scientific outcomes of a project still undergoing aimed at scrutinizing the forms and meanings of exhibition systems from the perspective of display, as, due to its inherently cross-disciplinary nature, the display device is a negotiation ground resistant to a univocal approach, transforming it into a strategic agent of crisis for historical, theoretical, and project disciplines.

Starting from case studies and methodological inquiries, the essays in this volume revolve around four thematic constellations, where pivotal and, in our view, open points of the Display debate converge.

1. Experience: understood as an ephemeral value but also as an embodied memory, which in its irreducible immanence and subjectivity poses a design problem, an aesthetic question, and a historiographical aporia.

2. Memory: how to map an appropriate cartography of sources on which it would be possible to study the display device in its complex and sometimes controversial values? Considering the diversified nature of these sources and their possible systems of archiving and/or museumization.

3. Engagement, understood as participative involvement and political commitment; dialectical, social, and transformative tension between the public, object, place, institution, up to the paradox of the exhibited work in the absence of an audience.

4. 'Display in action' and Wisdom of doing: an analysis of the processes of semanticization set in motion by the intrinsic nature, plastic consistency, and dramatization of spaces, inherently carrying a vocation and repositories of procedural knowledge values.

Contributors to the book

Roberta Albiero, Fabrizia Bandi, Giampiero Bosoni, Fiorella Bulegato, Francesca Castellani, Bernadette Dufrêne, Mario Farina, Antonella Gallo, Jérôme Glicenstein, Carlo Grassi, Anna Mazzanti, Angela Mengoni, Stefano Mudu, Roberto Pinto, Paul Rasse, Clarissa Ricci, Camilla Salvaneschi, Marco Scotti, Alessandra Vaccari, Angela Vettese, Francesca Zanella, and Stefania Zuliani. 

Scientific Committee:

Bruce Altshuler (New York University), Julie Bawin (Université de Liège), Helouise Costa (Universidade de São Paulo), Elena Dellapiana (Politecnico di Torino), Marie Fraser (UQAM, Montréal), Dario Scodeller (Università di Ferrara), Mary Anne Staniszewski (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy), Angela Vettese (Università Iuav di Venezia), Guido Zuliani (Cooper Union University, NewYork).

This volume was published with the support of funding from Università Iuav di Venezia - Research call 2023.

Vol 2 No 1 (2021)

Opera-Fanìa: On the Ostensive Conditions of Contemporary Art

What is the germinal cell of an exhibition, or rather of any exhibition event? OBOE Journal’s second issue departs from this question to investigate art’s fanìa (the Greek term for appearance) and the multiple ways in which art offers itself to the audience. As language, art is an instrument for exchange and an opportunity for the intertwining of two poles, that of the artists–those who make the art—and of the viewers, those who receive it and engage with it. 

The articles and reflections presented in our new “Echoes” column open up a vast discourse on the phenomenology of how an artwork presents itself, on perception and the role of the audience, and on contemporary art’s exhibiting practices and conditions.

Contributors: Mónica Amor, Lorenzo Balbi, Arnon Ben-Dror, Marco Bertozzi, Jens Hoffmann, Miriam La Rosa, Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini

Vol 3 No 1 (2022)

Exhibiting Prints: The Role of Printed Matter in International, Large-Scale Exhibitions

Prints, multiples, artist’s books, posters, printed ephemera, etc., have been exhibited alongside paintings and sculptures in international, large-scale exhibitions. They have been displayed in, sold, and collected from the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, Documenta and several other perennial exhibitions. Regardless of their continuous, vital presence within international venues and despite the proliferation of scholarship on biennials, there have been few studies on the role of prints and artist’s editions within these exhibitions. The texts collected in this third issue aim at opening art historical narratives towards a sometimes marginalised medium, which has been in many cases vital for the life and fortune of large-scale exhibitions: cultural tourism, dissemination of the avant-garde, bourgeois collections’, taste-making, democratisation of art, institutional critique as well as politics.