This week, I began to think about my project from a different perspective. What will happen after the exhibition ends? Since this is a temporary project taking place in a public space, it will not remain in the city permanently. I hope it will have a lasting influence and research value, so this project not only requires a curatorial structure focused on the “present”, but also a structure focused on its “continued existence”.

Looking back at our collective exhibition, I saw many traces of its existence. A short exhibition does not completely disappear after the setup is removed. The remaining posters, printed materials, installation photos, site traces, and the memories generated by the collective’s work are all proof that the exhibition existed. However, these things do not automatically become meaningful archives. Only when these records are consciously selected, organized, and structured can people continue to understand their structure, exhibition logic, and public experience after the exhibition ends. Therefore, from the perspective of the curator, I realized that the afterlife of an exhibition also requires planning.

This also changed my understanding of my curatorial project. I don’t want this project to exist merely as the moment when an audience happens to encounter one of the six exhibition points. Instead, I hope it can leave a trace that can be continued to be read, allowing people to still understand how “invisible boundaries” shape the daily life of Edinburgh after the exhibition is over. Therefore, I have now decided to incorporate documentation into the design at the very beginning of the project, rather than adding it later at the end. I need to plan in advance to keep the project map, site text, and visual cues as part of the final record. Record the relationship between each site, the audience, the works, and the surrounding urban environment with images and words.

This also made me think about legacy. The course toolkit clearly states that publications or legacy items can become part of the final design of the project, even if they do not need to be fully produced. Therefore, instead of imagining a large publication, I now prefer to design a more lightweight legacy form for this project. Establish a small digital archive to preserve the visual records of the six exhibition points and embed the electronic versions of the works in the visual materials of AR, allowing the audience to experience the route and this exhibition point as a visual tool even without the physical works. In this way, this project will not only exist as a brief public event but also as a continuous record, preserving how this city is organized through movement, exclusion, and uneven accessibility.

For me, an enlightening precedent is Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s “Night Walk for Edinburgh”. Its significance lies not only in the fact that the work takes place in a city, but also in the temporary and temporal viewing experience it offers. Through the guide and subsequent archival materials, this experience can still be read in the app even after the event has ended. This also helped me think more clearly about my own project: if my exhibition is temporary and distributed, then its continued existence cannot rely solely on memory, but must rely on the materials that allow the project to be re-entered and read again.

References

Art Fund. “Night Walk for Edinburgh.” 2019.

Fruitmarket. “Night Walk for Edinburgh: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.” 2019.

The Museum of Modern Art Archives. “Archives Exhibitions.”

The Museum of Modern Art Archives. “The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 1960–1969.”

This week, the most important issue for me was communication. Looking back at our collective exhibition, OurShell, I realized that one of its weaker parts was publicity. We put a great deal of energy into selecting works, installation, and display, but our communication with the public was very limited. The exhibition had only a small impact. Apart from people who already knew about the project or who were already inside Summerhall, we did not attract many other viewers. This made me realize that publicity is an important part of how a project truly becomes public.

This strengthened my thinking about communication in my own curatorial project. I can no longer assume that simply placing works in the city will naturally create meaningful public engagement. Although the project takes place in public space and may appear open by nature, visibility does not automatically mean accessibility. Claire Bishop’s discussion of participatory art was especially helpful for me here. She reminds us that the key issue is not only whether people are physically present, but how they are addressed, invited, and drawn into the project. For this reason, I can no longer assume that a public location alone is enough.

In curatorial practice, publicity needs to be deliberately designed. This is especially true for a project that takes place in an outdoor public space, because an exhibition does not automatically become understandable or noticeable simply because it is placed in the city.

First, as an outdoor project, I need to create more than one “entry point” that can trigger attention and understanding. Rather than relying only on accidental encounter, I want to build a clearer set of communication routes, such as a project map, short introductory texts, and clear on-site prompts. These should allow viewers to quickly recognize what kind of “invisible boundary” each location is exploring. In this way, even if audiences do not enter the project from a single starting point, they can still gain a basic framework for understanding it.

Second, the form of publicity must match the non-linear structure of the project. Since many viewers may only encounter one or two sites rather than the whole exhibition, each communication element must be able to function independently, instead of relying on the complete route to make sense. Different sites, therefore, need different forms of communication and prompting. In highly mobile areas such as Princes Street and Waverley Bridge, viewers are likely to stop only briefly, so concise and direct short texts are more suitable. These can quickly signal what kind of boundary is being discussed. Royal Mile is shaped more strongly by tourist attention, so clearer on-site prompts can help viewers recognize that this street is not only a cultural image, but also a public space constantly reshaped by consumption, performance, and the tourist economy. Holyrood Park has a slower rhythm, and audiences may stay longer, so it can support a more reflective form of interpretation. Slightly longer texts or prompts that emphasize the relationship between landscape and public use would be more appropriate there. Leith Walk and Ocean Terminal are closer to everyday community life, so the communication there needs to connect more directly with residents and regular passers-by, and to highlight differences in the way space is used.

Third, I need to think more carefully about who the project is actually for. Nina Simon argues that the relevance of a cultural project depends on how it connects with the lived experience and real concerns of its intended publics. For me, this means I can no longer treat “the public” as one vague category. I need to distinguish more clearly between residents, passers-by, commuters, and visitors. Residents are more likely to feel how tourism, commercial use, and spatial control gradually affect their sense of belonging, so the project needs to create stronger forms of recognition and emotional connection for them. Passers-by may only stop for a short moment, so the sites need immediate and clear visual or textual points of entry. Commuters are often under time pressure, which means the project must also allow for fragmented and brief engagement. Visitors, meanwhile, may be more willing to explore, but they often experience Edinburgh through familiar routes and accepted city images, so the project also needs to interrupt and reorganize those ways of seeing. Seen in this way, publicity is not simply about helping more people “see” the exhibition, but about allowing different publics to enter the project in different ways.

References

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

Cardoso, Kristen. Review of Book Review: The Art of Relevance, Written by Nina Simon. Weave (Ann Arbor, Mich.) 1, no. 6 (April 2017). https://doi.org/10.3998/weave.12535642.0001.605.

This week, through reflecting on and reviewing our collective curatorial practice, I gained many valuable practical experiences. These experiences also led me to reconsider the relationship between exhibition concept and production. Through the process of installing works at Summerhall, I became more aware that exhibition-making is not simply about choosing a theme or placing works in a room. It also involves gradually transforming ideas into a real and workable spatial display through exhibition planning, material selection, and practical installation. In our collective work, this transformation was never smooth. It developed step by step through continuous adjustment, as we encountered problems and tried to solve them.

During the installation process, we faced a difficult problem: how could we create visual coherence between works that were very different in style, size, form, and medium? Because the differences between the works were so large, we had to think carefully about the rhythm of viewing and about how audiences might move through the space. We developed more than three possible display arrangements and rejected them one by one. Through these discussions, I started to understand that the display itself is part of the curatorial argument. The position of each work can shape the viewer’s pace and also affect how they understand the relationship between individual works and the overall theme.

This experience also made me reflect more critically on my own curatorial project. In my exhibition, I have chosen public space as the exhibition site, with different points located across the city. After earlier adjustments, I have already changed the bus route into an optional way of connecting the sites rather than a fixed viewing path. Because of this, the relationship between the sites now needs to work in two ways at the same time. On the one hand, they need to exist as part of one overall curatorial structure. On the other hand, each site also needs to have viewing value when encountered on its own. Even if audiences meet these sites in a different order, the overall experience should still feel reasonable rather than abrupt. This means I need to pay more attention to designing a structure that can still function even when it is experienced unevenly. Here, the role of curatorial mediation becomes especially important. If audiences may encounter the sites in different sequences, coherence cannot depend only on order. It needs to be supported in other ways. For this reason, the map, on-site texts, and visual prompts within the AR elements will need to be more carefully designed so that viewers can recognize the connections between different sites.

At the same time, I became more aware of what curatorial responsibility means. During transportation, the frames of two works were damaged. This incident reminded me that curating does not only happen inside the exhibition space. It also includes risks that exist outside what the audience can directly see. This is especially important for my own curatorial project, because it is a fully outdoor exhibition. Questions of maintenance, permissions, risk, and responsibility to the public must be treated as seriously as concept and aesthetics. In terms of budget preparation, these unpredictable factors need to be considered much more carefully than in an indoor exhibition.

references

Kwon, Miwon. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

University of Edinburgh. “IMPORTANT 2026 Toolkit BLOGs and Speculative Individual Curatorial Projects.” Course document.

“Walking as a Form of Critical Curating.” OnCurating, no. 8. Accessed April 13, 2026.