Week 6 Refining the Curatorial Structure Through Feedback
🌟Clarifying the Concept
During this week’s collective discussion, I realised that my own project was still too loose. The works were interesting and well received, but I lacked a clear theoretical spine. My proposal included Pink Roundabout, urban-style photography, a looping video and several installations. Although they all related to “endless circulation,” they still felt disconnected. I needed more than a shared visual effect.
I also decided not to continue the second direction on fluid gender and body politics. Although this theme was interesting, it opened a separate ethical and theoretical field that I could not responsibly develop within the scale of this SICP. If I kept it, the project would risk becoming too broad: half about circular movement and repetition, half about gendered bodies and identity. This decision helped me focus the exhibition more clearly on circulation, repetition, spatial movement and everyday cycles.
To clarify my thinking, I turned to theories of circulation. Karl Marx’s concept of the circulation of capital, M–C–M’, showed me that circulation is not only physical movement, but also a structural logic. This helped me see my urban photographs and looping video as reflections of everyday repetition, such as consumption, labour and scrolling: forms of constant motion without real progress.
At the same time, Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Recurrence reshaped my understanding of the exhibition route. If everything returns, then “moving forward” may simply be repetition in another form. This changed how I designed the layout: instead of arranging works in a simple linear order, I wanted visitors to follow a circular path where returning close to the starting point becomes part of the exhibition experience.
🔎Spatial Structure and Looping Time
To strengthen the project, I divided the exhibition into two zones. The first focuses on physical and everyday cycles, such as urban rhythm and repeated movement. The second moves toward more psychological and existential forms of return, asking how repetition shapes memory, desire and daily experience. In this structure, Pink Roundabout no longer functions as an illustration of gender fluidity, but as a rotating installation that connects bodily movement, childhood play and circular desire.
I also added a looping video to bring more dynamism into the space. Erika Balsom (2013) argues that viewers rarely engage with moving images in galleries through uninterrupted viewing, but more often through partial and fragmented encounters. I therefore began to see the looping video not only as content, but as a time mechanism that reinforces repetition and suspended progression.
References
Balsom, Erika. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013.
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.
