The history of exhibitions is currently undergoing renewed interest. While today the “medium” of exhibition is a producer of specific discourses, and while it offers new practices a stage on which to emerge, it has also become the nexus of numerous institutional neo-positivisms relating to the ontological designation ‘art’. The exhibition, in the search for its reflexive forms (as in the quest for its own modernism) seems to become a genre in its own right. By distancing itself from today’s flurry of studies related to curating, this research project will draft a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of artistic institutions. Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions is a HES-SO/University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland & ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne research project.

The history of exhibitions is currently undergoing renewed interest. While today the “medium” of exhibition is a producer of specific discourses, and while it offers new practices a stage on which to emerge, it has also become the nexus of numerous institutional neo-positivisms relating to the ontological designation ‘art’. The exhibition, in the search for its reflexive forms (as in the quest for its own modernism) seems to become a genre in its own right. By distancing itself from today’s flurry of studies related to curating, this research project will draft a history of exhibitions sourced from a wide corpus reaching beyond the framework of artistic institutions. Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions is a HES-SO/University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland & ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne research project.