Curating Blog｜🐼Week 12

Xiaobao Ye/ / Uncategorised

 Week 12  Simplifying the Framework and Redesigning the Workshop

🤔Rethinking the Theory

As the project developed, I realised that Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Marx’s circulation of capital were no longer the most useful framework for the exhibition. Although they sound ambitious, and the idea of eternal recurrence initially helped me think about circularity, it gradually became too abstract and concept-heavy for the direction I wanted to take. Therefore, my project has shifted towards everyday experiences of repetition and circular forms, which are more immediate and accessible to visitors. However, Nietzsche is not entirely absent, but a part of the workshop, just no longer functions as the central framework. In a word, the exhibition now focuses more on how recurrence can be noticed and experienced in daily life, and I plan to use Nietzsche’s idea in the workshop to invite the audience to reflect on repetition in their own daily lives.

🧶Updating the Workshop: From Circular Writing to Mapping My Circles

My earlier idea, Circular Writing was focused on a looping writing structure, but I started to question whether it was genuinely accessible, or whether it repeated the same issue I noticed in the Mnemosyne Mapping workshop: a format that assumes comfort with literary or academic practices.

If the exhibition is about noticing repetition in everyday life, then the workshop should start from lived experience. I therefore redesigned it as Mapping My Circles, inspired by Circulation (Zhen Shang Jia Jia Peng, 2022). Participants document circular forms from a single day — a clock, a coffee cup, a commute — through drawing or writing, any form. The session closes with a shared discussion around Nietzsche’s question: if today repeated forever, would you embrace it? The workshop will be held on the first day of the exhibition, and selected outcomes will become part of the workshop archive and be shown in the exhibition.

🐻 Add an Interaction Section in Exhibition Space

At The Fruitmarket, the Information Room in Ilana Halperin’s What Is Us and What Is Earth offered a quiet space for drawing, resting, and leaving responses.

(Floor plan of Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, showing the Information Room location (highlighted). Source: Fruitmarket Gallery)

(Information Room in Ilana Halperin’s What Is Us and What Is Earth, Fruitmarket Upper Gallery, Edinburgh. Photographs by Xiaobao Ye, 2026)

I want to create a similar area at the end of my exhibition(site 7), with desk, sofa, bench, paper, prompts, and selected workshop outcomes as workshop archieve, my worshop will run in the first day of the exhibition. In the site 7, visitors can write or draw, leave their responses, or take them away.

The workshop would conclude with responses displayed on a message board. This also connects to Grant Kester’s idea that meaning can emerge through dialogue and exchange, not only through objects (Kester, 2004). In this way, the workshop extends the exhibition through participation and reflection.

(Exhibition layout for Endless Circulation, The Dundas Street Gallery, Edinburgh. Floor plan by Xiaobao Ye, 2026)

(Proposed exhibition layout for Endless Circulation with artwork references, The Dundas Gallery, Edinburgh.

Floor plan by Xiaobao Ye, 2026)

 Reference

.https://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/hold-your-event-with-us/

 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

 Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

 Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

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