Museum Off MuseumMuseum Off Museum 145144 Doreen MendeDoreen 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: firstly, 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. 1 Secondly, and more relevant to the following re-flections, 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. "e question of dis-tribution in capital and data, 2 and the geopolitical re-ordering processes both have an inevitable effect on what we do in the arena of contemporary art. "ere-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. "us, 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, filmmakers, 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. "e wording is not mine. Jacques Derrida speaks here of the topolitical 4 that ensues when the link between the political and the local is interrupted and cut off. 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 final 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 5. 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. "us, 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. "rough 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 finan-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. 3

In times when international curators can fly 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 new departments for non-west-ern contemporary art we cannot deny that there is a profound geopolitical exi-gency deeply affecting 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:

"is 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 [] "is is in any case, what opens the field to the desire to reappropriate oneself, and to the war between ap-propriations. 6

Derrida allows us to speculate about the consequences when we intend to push the conventional concept of space to-wards spatiality in exhibiting. "e 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. 7 "e addressee can be an artist, a curator, or anyone who commits him- or herself to the idea of the exhibition. 8 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. "ere 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). "e 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. "is 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?

H E R M A N A S S E L B E RG H SCapsular, 2006

23 min, various stillsCourtesy Auguste Orts, BrusselsCopyright Herman Asselberghs

I N T E R P O L I E R E N

E R I C B AU D E L A I R EThe Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao

Adachi and 27 Years without Images, 2012Expanded 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).

L AU R A H O R E L L IThe Terrace, 201124 min, film/video

YA Z A N K H A L I L IOn Love and other Landscapes, 2011

Book project46.4 x 32cm

Museum Off MuseumMuseum Off Museum 147146 Doreen MendeDoreen 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 conflict 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 defined in terms of the endurance of an ever-creative self-de-struction and constant reinvention. 9 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 conflict does not emerge from de-fending ones own territory, which means, in relation to our field of action, that it does not necessarily ask whether you are a curator or an artist. Rather, the conflict takes off 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. 10 (It would require another essay to unpack the multiple and challenging implications that the notion of war opens up here. I am not 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 battlefield through an excessively self-reflexive lens. Instead, to put it as briefly as possible in the frame of this essay: war has become a permanent condition on a global scale. "ere is no war without geopolitical en-tanglements imbedded in conflicting interests on a global scale, a circum-stance we currently can discern through the second Geneva conference about the Syrian situation. "e 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. 11)

All these reflections 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. 14 "is 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 from precise-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. "is 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. "e images chosen here propose an open archive around this essay. Each image is a hyperlink to further reading.

1 Cf. Maria Hlavajova et al., On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (Berlin: Revolver Publishing, 2008).

2 Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Furthermore: No specificity 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).

3 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.

4 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.

5 Cf. Sven Ltticken, Attending to Abstract "ings, New Left Review 54 (London, 2008), 101122; Joshua Simon, Neomaterialism (Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 2013).

6 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Memory: Topolitics and Teletechnology, in Echographies of Television, ed. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 58.

7 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.

8 Exhibiting is that what we share: artists and curators, filmmakers, 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

9 Here I am paraphrasing the first sentence of Okwui Enwezors remarkable essay, Coalition Building: Black Audio Film Collective and Transnational Postcolonialism, in "e Ghosts of Songs, ed. Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 106.

10 Cf. Derek Gregory, "e Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 255.

11 Cf. Milica Tomic, accessed January 23, 2014, milicatomic.wordpress.com/works/ container.

12 Cf. Doreen Mende, From the Desert. "e Itinerant: When Exhibiting Turns Its Back Against Itself, Manifesta Journal, accessed January 23, 2014, www.manifestajournal.org/online-residencies/doreen-mende/desert.

13 Terry Smith, A Questionnaire on "e Contemporary: 32 Responses, in OCTOBER, #130 (Fall 2009), 51.

14 Ibid.

elsewhere 12 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-flict 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 film, 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. "e 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. "e 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-effects 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. 13

Geopolitical changes in the years around 1989 opened up a degree of access to each other between societies closed off for a generation at least, if not for two. "e desire arose to create and dissemi-nate a contemporary art that would (in the words of Cuban critic Geraldo

S A M U E L S T E V E N SAtlantropa,2009

19:15 minCopyright Samuel Stevens

M I L I C A TO M I CContainer: Photography by other

means, 20042012Performance lecture summer 2012Photo: Arthur Zalewski, 2012

T R AV E L L I N G C O M M U N I QU Durational exhibition collaboration project Installation view fall 2013Copyright Armin Linke, Doreen Mende,

Milica Tomic et al.

K AT R I N M AY E RAbers, 2011

Print project and installation

T H E OTO L I T H G RO U PThoughtform, 2011Exhibition project

Photo: Copyright MACBA Barcelona and the artists

C AT H L E E N S C H U S T E RNot a waste, 2013Essay film, 10 min

Installation view, Berlin Copyright Cathleen Schuster

A B D E R R A H M A N E S I S S A KORostov-Luanda, 1997

90 min