The engagement with student artist Siri Burt, who uses photography and ceramics to reinterpret Scottish folklore and mythologies (Burt, 2024), opens the discourse on the potential exhibitory spaces for our respective curatorial projects. There is a strong association between the narration that her artwork aims to dissect with the displayed locality, which occurs to me with the long-term project Space Invaders (Invader, 1990- ) by the French artist Invader, wherein the fluid curatorial action he takes offers some insights.
Beginning in Paris, installing ceramic mosaics on walls of architecture in the city becomes the Modus Operandi the artist adopts. When asked about the choice of “invaded locations”, Invader responds by saying “Not everybody goes or can go to museums or galleries, but everybody walks or drives in the street going through their daily lives (Wang, 2014, para.10).” Also taken on streets, artist Robert Filliou executed a similar curatorial gesture in the 1960s, Galerie Legitime/The Frozen Museum (1969), in which the passer-by would be greeted and asked to pick up artworks inside the portable gallery – the hat of the artist. Writer Alison Green comments on this approach, stating that it delivers a message to the public that “art should be that available (Green, 2018, p.35).” Both artists, rather than installing artworks in static environments such as the white cube, practised the principle of relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002), actively engaging with the public and their surroundings by using the changing social space as the experimental repository.
Figure 1. One of the artwork from Space Invader I took in 120 Rue Saint-Martin, 75004 Paris, France. Coordinates: 48.86116° N, 2.35160° E
Figure 2. Robert Filliou, Galerie Légitime, 1969, transparent plastic foil on photograph mounted on wood, two hooks, and two rings, 42 x 60.2cm.
By exchanging thoughts between artists and curators, the workshop has provided valuable inspiration on alternative exhibition sites. As editors of Exhibition Experiments wrote in the introduction of the book, “…contemporary exhibitionary practice is or should be an experimental practice…is a site for the generation… (Basu and Macdonald, 2007, p.2)” For contemporary artistic practice, by saying “thinking out of the box”, it sometimes refers to a broader and more experimental playground for strategies and actions.
(words: 308)
Reference:
Basu, P. & Macdonald, S. (2007) “Introduction: Experiments in Exhibition, Ethnography, Art, and Science,” in Exhibition Experiments. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. pp. 2.
Bourriaud, N. (2002) Relational aesthetics / Nicolas Bourriaud ; translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les Presses du réel.
Burt, S. (2024) Siri Burt. Available at: https://www.siriburt.com/ (Accessed: 14 March 2024).
Filliou, R. (1969) Galerie Légitime. Available at: https://www.barbarawien.de/artist.php?artist=12 (Accessed: 15 March 2024).
Green, A. (2018) When artists curate : contemporary art and the exhibition as medium / Alison Green. London: Reaktion Books, pp. 35.
Space Invaders (2024) Invader. Available at: https://www.space-invaders.com/world/ (Accessed: 14 March 2024).
Wang, J. (2014) ‘Space Invaders’ Hits Hong Kong. Available at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-SJB-13768 (Accessed: 14 March 2024).
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