The PARSE Summer 2021 issue On the Question of Exhibition will take as its broad agenda an exploration of the nature, role, and tendency of exhibition. We are interested in works that seek to apprehend or interrogate different aspects of the exhibition as a broad genre of practice. ‘Exhibition’ often appears as a self-explanatory category. It is a key term for naming acts of showing. The term ‘exhibition’ seems to manifest in itself the very same operation of clear and distinct presentation that it designates. This way of thinking takes the exhibition as an already comprehended genre, as a process of cognitive and aesthetic given-ness. This habit of thought that takes exhibition as a transparent construct often appears both in the discourse of the every-day and in specialist jargon of academia and the art field. In this way of thinking, the question – “What is an exhibition?”- offers no real problem. ‘Exhibition’ is simply where things are shown and where people go/come to see those things that are on display.
However, matters become complicated in considering the breadth and diversity of modes and sites of exhibiting: the boutique art gallery; the global spectacle of the Venice architecture and art Biennales; the quirky diorama displays of a provincial natural history museum; the high-octane mise en scène and architecture of contemporary retail spectacles; and the scholarly display of competence. Matters are further complicated when attending to the ways in which principles of display, exposition, demonstration, exemplification, taxonomy, circulation, mediation, commentary, spectatorship, and valorization operate within these dispersed fields of exhibition. When attending to the themes of the exhibiting institution and to exhibition variously construed as genre, poetic, and apparatus, the question of exhibition appears not as one of clear presentation but rather as one of some obscurity. The somewhat antiquated Cartesian figure of clear and distinct presentations in contrast with moments of obscurity may help to underline the epistemological stakes of exhibition across the arts and sciences. With respect to the cognitive and aesthetic divisions of colonial-modernity, there is a shifting valency in the operation of exhibition. This in turn begs the question(s) of exhibition with respect to political imaginaries and worldings for which colonial-modernity is not the universal reference frame: worldings that show themselves beyond the ken of Eurocentric critiques of Eurocentrism.