Herman Asselberghs, Capsular, 23 min, various stills, 2006, courtesy Auguste Orts, Brussels, © Herman Asselberghs

Doreen Mende

*1977 in East Germany, lives and works in Berlin.

Doreen Mende works internationally as an exhibition-maker, curator, writer and theorist based in Berlin. Her attendance at Documenta11’s education programme, with its exhibition in Kassel in 2002, profoundly transformed her overall stance towards art, performance, politics, and economics along the lines of anti-colonial thinking. She has just completed her practice-based PhD in Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmiths College, London, while acting as a faculty member of the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) since 2010. Informed by her research, her six-part essay »The Itinerant: When Exhibiting Turns Its Back Against On? Itself« for Manifesta Journal online addresses a series of concerns around geopolitics in exhibiting. She is co-founder of the publication series »DISPLAYER«, and the project space, General Public.

Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images, expanded installation, summer 2012

Armand Marco, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Jean-Luc Godard in the Baqa refugee camp in Jordan 1970 during the shooting of Until Victory: Working and Thinking Methods of the Palestinian Revolution (realized with Anne-Marie Mièvielle as Ici et Ailleurs four years later).

Laura Horelli, The Terrace, 24 min, film/video, 2011

Yazan Khalili, On Love and other Landscapes, book project, size 46.4 x 32cm, 2011

Katrin Mayer, Abers, ein bisschen breiter*, print project and installation, 2011

The Otolith Group, Thoughtform, exhibition project 2011, photo: © MACBA Barcelona and the artists

Cathleen Schuster, Not a waste, Essay film, 10 min, installation shot, Berlin 2013, © Cathleen Schuster

Abderrahmane Sissako, Rostov-Luanda, 90 min, 1997

Samuel Stevens, Atlantropa, 19:15 min, 2009, © Samuel Stevens

Milica Tomic, Container: Photography by other means, 2004-2012, performance lecture summer 2012, photo: Arthur Zalewski, 2012

Travelling Communiqué, durational exhibition collaboration project, installation shot fall 2013, © Armin Linke, Doreen Mende, Milica Tomic et al.

What are we to think about the current state of »the exhibition«?

I would like to return to the question as to what making an exhibition means, and what that can do for us in the era of globalization. Basically, our present era is characterized by two principles: firstly, an excess of information regulated via standardized distribution systems that jeopardize and conceal alternative ways to include the vast variety of processes for generating knowledge.¹ Secondly, and more relevant to the following reflections, there has been a profound re-ordering process after the world-fracturing events around 1989 (and one still ongoing), which has re-shuffled the global relations between societies, economies and cultures. The question of distribution »in capital and data,«² and the geopolitical re-ordering processes both have an inevitable effect on what we do in the arena of contemporary art. Therefore, the question above undoubtedly connotes that we have reached a limit in what we have commonly understood as »the exhibition«.³ 

In times when international curators can fly easily from one place in the world to another, when residency programmes take artists to remote or unfamiliar places for a few months to produce a work that somehow »connects« to their new experiences, when biennales foster within contemporary art an economy of »internationality« which may stand in paradoxical contrast to the particularity of artistic practice in support of political and social struggles, and when European institutions such as Tate Modern in London extend their collections with new departments for non-western contemporary art … we cannot deny that there is a profound geopolitical exigency deeply affecting artistic production, and it is one prompting us to re-think what the exhibition is and what it can do for us; to speculate – in line with the geopolitical imperatives today – about a multi-layered spatiality within the space of exhibiting. Thus, the exhibition’s format itself – its limits, potentialities and requirements – must be redrafted. With what is a profound change in the conditions governing the exhibition, therefore, consequences must necessarily ensue for our various activities as artists, curators, theorists, architects, designers, writers, filmmakers, researchers, and exhibition-goers.

In other words, our consideration of what the space of exhibiting is and what it does needs to embrace the fact that exhibiting processes result from a geopolitical exigency: to make something public means not only to put something on public display, but also to »displace places«. The wording is not mine. Jacques Derrida speaks here of »the topolitical«⁴ that ensues when the link between the political and the local is interrupted and cut off. Any element on public display evinces a predeliction for travel, which takes any element destined for public display from one place to the other by crossing borders, customs controls and time zones. Let me make clear: by using the term »element«, I wish to step out of the paradigm of the exhibit (the material final product of an artistic process) in order to draw our attention to a wider range of apparent formations and formulations, as they have been discussed recently through concepts such as »abstract things« and »neomaterialism«⁵. By the time it arrives in the exhibition space, the element will have lost any claim on originality deriving from its actual origin. We might be able to verify the location, time and author of production (and usually curators do know about all this). However, each element’s arrival on public display may add a further layer contributing to the concept of an unlimited originality. Thus, the act of making something public inevitably erases the claim for any »originary origin«. Each time something arrives, anywhere at all, it will insist, therefore, on unpacking its own conditions for how it is to appear. Through such a loss of any possibility of claiming the »originary origin«, there is indicated one crucial component in our re-thinking process towards the exhibition.

Such a situation arises when exhibition practice is at stake and in play, but it means something more complex than just putting things on display. Yet, this is where we are: Can we conceive of the exhibition space beyond the capitalist paradigm that operates so relentlessly to separate production and presentation (Marx would say: consumption)? Since we live in a period of »capitalist realism«, as the British blogger and theorist Mark Fisher so remarkably analyzed it in 2009, shortly after the global financial crisis, I suggest making use of Derrida’s proposal of »the topolitical«, as mentioned above. In order to return to our means of articulation and conditions of practice, namely the space and the exhibition, it is valuable to link such spatio-geographic concern with that which Derrida goes on to frame as a desire for »exappropriation«:

»This mirage, that the addressee might reappropriate what reaches him (or her), is a fantasy. But this is no reason to abandon the addressee to passivity and not to militate for all forms, summary or sophisticated, of the right of response, right of selection, right of interception, right of intervention. […] what I have proposed to call exappropriation […] This is in any case, what opens the field to the desire to reappropriate »oneself«, and to the war between appropriations.«⁶ 

Derrida allows us to speculate about the consequences when we intend to push the conventional concept of space towards spatiality in exhibiting. The sentences above speak of a seemingly violent constellation of appropriations, which comes into existence when each addressee insists on his or her particular approach to what is being exposed on public display. Avoiding the category »viewer« here enables the erasure of disciplined hierarchies, which art history, and also exhibition history as a new discipline in such studies, usually wish to distinguish precisely.⁷ The addressee can be an artist, a curator, or anyone who commits him- or herself to the idea of the exhibition.⁸ Furthermore, and quite crucially, the addressee is the one who takes up the right to respond, to »select«, to intercept and to intervene. When we consider the exhibition from this perspective, we see that the addressee has never been passive. There will be neither an awareness of selectivity, operating simply as a spectatorial critique, nor will the constellation remain a theoretical exercise for the sake of theory or rely on the concept of art mediation (Kunstvermittlung). The confrontation is one-to-one, an immediate encounter within the very space of exhibiting, far from contemplation and sublimation.
 
In the last analysis, exappropriation requires, above all, both appropriation »and« expropriation of that which is exposed. In other words, any act of appropriation entails the expropriation of meaning and, perhaps even inadvertently, of copyrights and intellectual property. At the same time, expropriation could also be read as claiming the rights to the means of production. We might well already understand the complexity, including the troubling degrees of violence and the possibilities of misunderstanding that come with the act of making public, i.e., the exhibition. I would like to connect such complexity with a practice that cross-reads the double activity of »to display«/»to displace« to deem it a »displaycing practice«. And secondly, such a double gesture within the work of exappropriation projects its consequences back onto the one who appropriates: to reapproprate »oneself«. This sounds like an exhausting task for anyone who declares him- or herself to be the addressee. At the same time, it provides the ground for a radical reinvention of one’s own position in relation to one’s own surroundings.

At this point, I can already hear the screams of outrage from some readers, who would want to intervene vehemently against such a proposal by mounting an elaborate critique of neoliberalism. But let me de-escalate the conflict even before it gets properly started by pointing out that one of the central qualities of revolutionary discourses in the liberation struggles of entire societies, just as much as in avant-garde movements of the arts on a global scale, has been defined in terms of the endurance of an ever-creative self-destruction and constant reinvention.⁹ In spatial terms, the addressee’s rights radically distort a view of space as a smooth entity. Derrida speaks of a »war of appropriations«. Along the lines of liberation struggles and the hope for an avant-garde, I propose to connect the term »war« more closely with a struggle to gain and keep the rights of response, selection and intervention on an absolutely equal footing within the exhibition space, than to connect this »war« with a territorial battle »per se«. In other words, the conflict does not emerge from defending one’s own territory, which means, in relation to our field of action, that it does not necessarily ask whether you are a curator or an artist. Rather, the conflict takes off from »uneven geographies – they do not produce a single, smooth surface – and they are made intelligible through their own imaginative geographies«, as Derek Gregory suggests we should think about the colonial present.¹⁰ (It would require another essay to unpack the multiple and challenging implications that the notion of »war« opens up here. I am not primarily thinking of projects such as »A Guiding Light« (2010) by Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle, which considers a discussion of the exhibition as a battlefield through an excessively self-reflexive lens. Instead, to put it as briefly as possible in the frame of this essay: war has become a permanent condition on a global scale. There is no war without geopolitical entanglements imbedded in conflicting interests on a global scale, a circumstance we currently can discern through the second Geneva conference about the Syrian situation. The work by Milica Tomic, particularly her project »Container« [2004–2012], unfolds the mechanisms of the permanent global war explicitly through a process-related artistic practice aimed at promoting an understanding of the network for the global production of violence.¹¹)

All these reflections proceed from years of research, on the one hand, into display strategies and exhibition histories of the post-war and contemporary period of European modernity, and on the other, into the modes of production of international solidarity – amidst a »socialist« web of relations – during the Cold War period, that was enacted through the means of producing »and« publishing photography. I have written elsewhere¹² about the work by the East-German photographer Horst Sturm, who collaborated with revolutionaries of the Palestinian liberation movement when he travelled as a delegate to various places in the Middle East and North Africa throughout the 1980s to work there closely together with members of the movements who had become photographers after the armed struggle. Beside the fact that the research engaged in complicated political questions, it also helped me to unpack a highly contradictory dilemma within exhibiting, and one that emerges from the split between production »and« presentation: Because the production conditions of these photographs, taken in the 1980s during rather informal educational gatherings and existing today in Sturm’s personal image archive, do, to a large extent, conflict with the exhibition space as an Euclidian-measured entity. Photography courses brought the various Palestinian participants and the East-German photographer together, so that the images are products of social relations imbedded in a political cause: Walks in the streets of Beirut, visits to the militants’ camps, informal dinners, and clandestine encounters with the movement’s leaders contribute as much to the production of the photographs as the work in the laboratory, the development of the film, and the selection the »right« images for publishing purposes. However, as we discussed above, there is no such thing as an »originary origin«, i.e., it is simply impossible to show the production conditions as they were. The transfer of the archival photographs into the world of contemporary art, however, would displace them not only in time and space but also with regard to their ideologically and politically informed framework (the socialist project on a global scale collapsed around 1989. The GDR does not exist anymore, while Palestine still waits to become a state). It turned out to be valuable to approach the concern for such geopolitical issues in exhibiting by including the profound paradigm shift of spatial / political constellations on a global scale after the world-fracturing events around 1989, i.e., after the breakdown of the old binary world order (capitalism/socialism).

Terry Smith clearly observes that the after-effects of 1989 have had, and still have, a great impact on the movements of contemporary art, what he describes as a »transnational turn«:

»the transnational turn has generated a plethora of art shaped by local, national, anti-colonial, and independent values (diversity, identity, critique). It has enormous international currency through travellers, expatriates, new markets, and especially biennales. Hybrids of all kinds appeared.«¹³  

Geopolitical changes in the years around 1989 opened up a degree of access to each other between societies closed off for a generation at least, if not for two. The desire arose to create and »disseminate a contemporary art that would (in the words of Cuban critic Geraldo Mosquera) »remake Western culture« and thus be valid throughout the entire world.«¹⁴ This means, contemporary art today emerges from spatio-geographic relations on global scale that have redrafted the world order, diluting clear-cut divisions between East and West as much as between South and North. It’s absolutely time, therefore, to re-think the space of the exhibition from precisely such a geopolitical perspective, at a time when contemporary / international art has become one of the most important areas of globalization. While the geopolitical proximities during the Cold War period resided in concepts of internationality and internationalisms, today we live in an era of globalization. This is when spatiality enters the space of the exhibition, i.e., when space exceeds its Euclidean measurements and links up with a set of relations that have existed and (might still) exist on a global scale.

In exhibition and exhibiting, much still remains to emerge from the movement of space towards spatiality.

N.B. The images chosen here propose an open archive around this essay. Each image is a hyperlink to further reading.