Drawing on close readings of selected exhibitions by contemporary artists and texts by key theorists, this seminar explores exhibitions as practices of connecting. Rather than understanding exhibitions merely as media for communicating knowledge or as containers for displaying objects, we examine how exhibitions establish, negotiate, and transform relationships between objects, people, institutions, cultures, materialities, and temporalities.

The seminar investigates exhibitions as relational forms that bring heterogeneous elements into dialogue. To analyse these relations, we draw on concepts such as actor-networks, assemblages, contact zones, entanglements, and meshworks. Rather than treating these as competing models, the seminar brings them into conversation while attending to their different analytical emphases.

To pass the course, students must

• be successfully registered and admitted to the seminar;
• attend at least 80% of the class sessions;
• complete the required readings and preparatory work before each session;
• actively participate in class discussions;
• successfully complete an oral examination involving the application of theoretical concepts in analysing a case study.

Across five sessions, the seminar combines discussions of selected theoretical texts with close analyses of exhibitions and installations. Sessions include short lectures, individual and group work, and one guest lecture by an artist-curator.

By the end of the seminar, students will be able to

– use analytical approaches to examine exhibitions and artworks;
– relate theories to exhibitions and artworks;
– critically assess how exhibitions produce and negotiate social, cultural, and temporal relations;
– develop independent, theoretically informed arguments about exhibitions as relational forms.