How to ‘edit’ exhibitions

18 Aug 2006 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Features, Japan, Worldwide

What does it actually take to design an exhibition? How do you decide which artist to invite, how do you make them create new pieces fitting a certain theme and in which order do you display the works? As a great lover of contemporary art museums, I started wondering about the editing process of art exhibitions recently, especially since I noticed more exhibitions with a specific purpose or message around. How can you create an atmosphere which represents the art works best and make people follow a certain route in order to get your point across?

I interviewed 5 different curators from England and Japan to find out!

Interviewed by Chihiro Murakami
Translated by Junko

1: Mizuki Takahashi from the Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito

Art Tower Mito is a cultural complex building in Mito, Ibaraki, which has been run for 16 years by the Mito Arts Foundation. Despite their remote location from the center of Tokyo, it seems they have never lost people’s attention for their high-quality concept projects such as CAFE in Mito, a project completed with audience’s participation, or the much talked about X-color: Graffiti in Japan exhibition which got taken outside the museum’s walls and spread graffiti on 13 walls around the city. I spoke to Mizuki Takahashi, one of Art Tower Mito’s curators about her experiences at this unusual and outstanding art center.

Mizuki, you used to work at the Mori Arts Museum in Roppongi, but then decided to move to Mito instead. The Life Exhibition which started this July is the first project that was mainly curated by you. What were your major considerations when creating this exhibition?

Since Mito is rather small, having a contemporary art museum makes a big difference for the city, so I thought about both: the situation of art at the moment and our museum’s role for that. I came to the conclusion that we needed to show the beauty of art above all, in different forms in order to shorten the distance between art and ordinarly people in the city. For this exhibition, we didn’t only ask contemporary artists to participate, but also got manga artists, HIV prevention activists, disabled artists and others involved. I believe that we managed to select art works which are truly touching and give the audience some hints for the question: “Why do people express themselves?”

What particular quality is required to be a curator for the Art Tower Mito, do you think?

Curators here do everything from planning to funding and moving stuff. There is no extra qualification to be a curator in Mito as such, but you need to have good panning skills and vitality. Besides, you have to be tough both mentally and physically, which is probably the same for any kind of job. A curator is a professional observer of art works, you need to find a theme based on careful analysis of what is going on in the art world related to the social situation and above all, find out, what you can do about it. Reading a hidden theme only works if you keep looking at art works constantly and visit as many exhibitions as possible. Curators need good communication skills to pass on the message from artists through exhibitions and events to the public.

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2: Kazuko Aono, director of the educational program / curator at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art.

The private foundation Hara Museum opened in 1979 in Shinagawa and is considered one of the best museums in Tokyo introducing contemporary art with a certain aesthetic quality. The museum received a lot of attention recently for holding the first Olafur Eliasson solo exhibition in Japan: “Your Light Shadow.” At the moment the “YOROYORON” exhibition by Tabaimo is on display with installations implementing animation.

Could you tell our readers what the Hara Museum has been aiming at? What you think is unique to your museum’s concept?

The Hara Museum has always introduced contemporary art, since the very beginning. I find that contemporary art allows you to feel connected to the artists, because we share the same life-time. Therefore, the way we exhibit art aims at offering a place for people from different generations or different sets of values to get together and communicate.

Something that might be very unique to our museum might be the actual venue: the private mansion – turned-museum, and we are trying to make a good use of the space.

How would you describe a curator’s job?

A curator decides what art works to pick through careful inspection from a lot of works being born one after another. When dealing with contemporary art, you cannot estimate which of all the works are going to be greatly valuable in the future, since they haven’t reached their final value yet. So, our job is to show our selection and in this respect ask what people think about it.

We also try to keep our quality very high. Not only because we are responsible for artists who are referred to as “one who exhibited at the Hara Museum”, but also for the audience in general who trust our quality. We never exhibit something that we feel half done or without 100% satisfaction.

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3: Libby Sellers from the Design Museum London.

At a riverside of the Thames in London, the Design Museum is one of the world’s leading modern design museums. Established in 1989, their mission is to stimulate people through design. Their activities range from holding exhibition to sending out information and organizing educational activities. Always showing a couple of exhibitions at the same time, “The Great Design Race” by Formula One is one of their current ones.

Libby, how did you actually become a curator?

I studied both History of Art and History of Design - most curators have some sort of relevant degree. Others come from a professional background- say, fashion design, graphic design, etc. Now there are actually various degrees around which specialize in curation. However, like most jobs: it is hard for new comers to break into the industry. Few jobs available and so many people wanting them.

How do you find the right designers and how do you approach them?

Keeping an eye on the developments in design, reading journals, attending other exhibitions, etc. To approach them, it depends on who and where they are. Sometimes we simply meet them at various events such as exhibitions, design fairs, degree shows, conferences, etc. or other times we get in contact with them about their work through their manufacturers.

What is your definition of curating?

Curation is not just about organizing exhibitions for institutions. It should really be seen as content provision and management. It could be for a book, an article, a conference –whatever. All you are doing is bringing together a selection of topics for discussion.

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4: Kai Ozawa from the non-profit organization Arts Initiative Tokyo (AIT): a curator who doesn’t belong to a specific museum.

The AIT is a non profit organization authorized by Tokyo Metropolis in 2002. Aiming at building platforms where different kinds of people can be somehow related to contemporary art, they work on educational or exhibition projects without having their own gallery. They offer 7 different courses including courses about curatorial practices in their educational project called MAD (Making Art Different).

A so called AIT (eight) Hour Museum exhibition is held from time to time ever since your organization got established. I heard that the experiences visitors had there was very different to other exhibitions. Why is that? Could you explain to us what it was like?

We asked ourselves whether the usual set up of exhibitions where people stand in front of art without saying a word was really the best environment to appreciate art. What would it be like if people were in a more relaxed situation like lying down on the floor and drinking beer or something like that? That’s why we made the first AIT Hour Museum look like a dim lounge with beanbags on the floor. Also, there was no particular theme, even though exhibitions are usually composed to lead audience’s thoughts to a certain conclusion. On the contrary, our audience had to move around actively to get something out of the exhibits.

Our third exhibition (March this year) was lengthened to 12 hours instead of 8. Collaborated with an electronic company Panasonic, building micro communities through art practices and improving our living environment is our underlining theme. We showed taped interviews by various art initiatives in Japan on monitors and exhibited posters by artists or artworks.

What does curation mean to you?

I always seek ways of how to balance the relationship between the art and the people, the social aspect of an exhibition. Especially in Japan, I feel certain gap between what curators or experts consider good - which is often very un-accessible for a general audience, and the kind of art people enjoy and are open for, which is not always considered good from the expert’s point of view.

Generally, I think that curation should be a bit more flexible and performative. Artists and thinkers can take action immediately in an urgent social situation, but curators are always there to wait until the works are finished and then start to think about what to do with it.

I once held a low-budget exhibition of video-art with a quite short preparation time right before the Iraqi war in 2003. In that, artists including Susan Hiller or Seifollah Samadian and I separately exchanged a couple of dialogues through e-mail and made a package for, I guess, 3 months.

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5: Claire Catterall, director of Scarlet Projects

Scarlet Peojects is a creative agency established in London in 2000. The fact that they employ different curators for their design or architecture exhibitions, events, their consulting and also business management provides them with a fresh approach to their whole process of planning and presenting.

What do you think is the most significant difference in your way of curating compared to curating at other museums or galleries?

Not being attached to an institution allows us a greater degree of freedom, flexibility and also a wider perspective. We find that the larger institutions get bound up with internal issues – internal politics, a crippling organizational structure, as well as a very internalized view of themselves. Because we are small and work with a number of different artists and clients, we can approach curating exhibitions and events in a much more lateral way. We can also respond to what’s happening in the world of architecture and design more spontaneously.

How do you come up with your curating concepts?

We get work either by clients coming to us and wanting an idea or we approach clients with an idea of something we’d like to do. In the case of the Village Fate, the V&A asked us to come up with an idea featuring young designers that would bring a younger audience in to the V&A. I think they had in mind that we would organize a series of talks. We came up with the idea for the Village Fate, a traditional British institution, which is more accessible and enjoyable. With the fate, you get to meet the designer, engage with him or her through playing a game, and walk away with a piece of design by them. Because the designer also has to create their stall in their own style you also get a much better sense of who they are.

I assume that your main audience is British, Europeans, and Londoners who consist of different nationalities. How does this audience’s character reflect your curating?

We are very aware of our audience and think that consideration of one’s audience is key to the success of an exhibition/event. Each of our events have a different audience. It’s really important to shape whatever you do to your audience. But we always aim to inspire them, to show them something new and to fill them with wonder!

What do you consider most important for curating?

What sets curating apart from organizing, selecting, or even project-managing an exhibition or other event is this: the provision of both an artistic and an intellectual framework. The artistic framework is bound up in the recognition that the exhibition or event is something that is experienced viscerally, and, as such, is different from something that is experienced on a passive or intellectual level only – such as a book or a conference. Curating offers an opportunity to communicate an idea purely through an emotional response to the physicality of the environment, or, put simply, to create a sense of wonder. This is why exhibitions that are little more than books on walls often fail to inspire.

Art always reflects a social situation and people’s thoughts in a particular period of time. Every day new artworks get submitted and - even though painful for some to realize - add to a big pile of contemporary expression. Therefore, curators are not only asked to collect, organize and exhibit art works, but also to edit the pieces: find the right theme, place, purpose, order, taste and feel to arrange the works in a way that makes them more accessible for a greater audience. Good exhibitions have the power to rock your emotion besides communicating the true core of the works.

Thanks a lot to all the curators who took their time to talk to PingMag.

23 Comments

1. Cool article, to bad i only do screen only design :)

   Posted by: kuswanto on August 18th, 2006 at 11:35 pm

2. Wow! I really want to visit Art Tower Mito!

   Posted by: ヤーッコ on August 19th, 2006 at 1:23 am

3. I’m loving exhibitions!

   Posted by: N I C O on August 19th, 2006 at 3:06 am

4. I’m loving exhibitions! http://www.bbucur.com
   hi class photography

   Posted by: Bogdan Bucur on August 19th, 2006 at 5:41 am

5. Hi,
   I’m totally impressed by this post. Very well done. And the propositions expressed on the interviews are vital.
   My sincere congrats to the authors.
   Kuja

   Posted by: Kuja on August 19th, 2006 at 10:35 am

6. great article!! thanks.

   Posted by: ann on August 30th, 2006 at 6:28 pm

7. i am a graphic designer doing exhibition design on and off… so it would be very inspiring for me to see more “information design” and “themed exhibition design” coming over japan!…
   it is a very inspiring job u guys r doing. thank you:)))

   Posted by: miaww on September 16th, 2006 at 6:55 am

8. wonderful article,an artist makes a window,and a curator opens it to the world.
   thankew
   khadim Ali

   Posted by: khadim Ali on March 17th, 2007 at 4:02 pm

9. will try to get to art tower mito in a week or so…

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