This course examines the exhibition as a cultural form through which power, knowledge, and visibility are produced, organized, and contested. Tracing the modern genealogy of exhibition practices, from nineteenth-century department stores, zoos, world exhibitions, and museums to avant-garde experiments and the emergence of the white cube as a defining environment of contemporary art, we will investigate how display structures ways of seeing and shapes space and publics. The course invites students to approach exhibitions as spatial, aesthetic, and temporal arrangements that regulate what can be seen, who becomes visible, and how visibility is constructed. At the same time, we will consider exhibitions as events, sites of encounter, metaphors, and infrastructures.

Throughout the semester, students will engage with the writings and works of, among others, Tony Bennett, Kobena Mercer, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Hannah Baer, Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński, Joseph Grigely, and Marysia Lewandowska. The course will also feature guest presentations and conversations with practitioners and researchers, including Khadija Zinnenburg Carroll, Ivana Mihaela Žimbrek, and Bogdana Kosmina.

The course combines historical case studies with discussions of current exhibition practices, equipping students with critical tools to analyze exhibitions as instruments of institutional authority and power, while also exploring counter-strategies that reclaim space and challenge established relations and dominant narratives.

“Exhibitionary Complex: Poetics and Politics of Display” takes place in dialogue with Hephzibah Druml’s course “Works and/on Display.”

Active participation; in-class presentation 

The number of participants is limited to twenty (20).