How Exhibitions Shape Visual Culture: Notes towards Documenta 13

Speaker: Carolyn Christov Bakargiev

February 12, 2010 | 6.30 pm
Volte Gallery, Mumbai

The Documenta is regarded as the most important exhibition of contemporary art, drawing attention from all over the world. It was initiated in 1955 by the artist and art educator Arnold Bode in Kassel, Germany. The singular character of the exhibition has been preserved. Every five years, a new director is chosen and the exhibition is reinvented, a concept which to date has been affirmed by the public’s interest.

In this talk, Bakargiev will share some notes about Documenta 13 to be held in Kassel 2012, while articulating how large exhibitions shape visual culture and the sharing of world-views.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a curator and writer, is the Artistic Director of Documenta 13, 2012. She has been Chief Curator at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea since 2002, and was interim director for 2009. The author of publications including Arte Povera (London, 1999), she was Senior Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center / a MoMA affiliate, New York, from 1999 to 2001. Curated exhibitions include On taking a normal situation and retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present, Antwerp (1993), The Moderns, Rivoli-Turin (2003) and Faces in the Crowd, London and Turin (2004). She co-curated the first edition of the Turin Triennale (2005) and in 2007-08 she was Artistic Director of the 16th Biennale of Sydney – Revolutions – Forms That Turn (2008), a constellation of works exploring the impulse to revolt and the forms embedded in the etymology of the word ‘revolution’, as well as the relation and the gap between revolutionary art and an ‘art for the revolution’.