"Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits."
- Robert Smithson
The Museum and Gallery Practices team put up four exhibitions for the durattion of the course. As a part of this team with so many months of exposure in this field, one of the two most important things I've learned, despite it being a clichéd opinion, is that there is no failsafe set of rules that can turn an exhibition into a success and Curator -artist relationships can make or break the entire operation. Nothing helps more than experience and a good grasp of all the possible variables that contribute to the equation.
Time Puncture
Our first exhibition was in collaboration with the Memory Lab project. The number of contributing artists were almost the same as the number of people we had in the exhibition design team. This exhibiton was by far the greatest challenge, for the simple fact that this was the first time we were attempting to host our very own exhibition.
This meant that not only did we need to think about the Space design issues, we had to think of everything, - our logo, the venue, the colour scheme, labels, artist liasons, etc.
The choices of colour schemes.
The inner most circle represented the colour of the text, and its relation with the outermost circle changed with the lighting of the space they needed to be put in.
The Labels,
(1) was designed to be put up in all the dark spaces, ie. spaces that were assigned to be video
installation spaces.
(2) was designed to be put up in lighted spaces.
The artist's picture was placed in the white space, and the artist statements were put up in the spaces right after.
Unfold your cupboard
The second Exhibition was set up on the terrace space in Jaaga, Bangalore. This was our second exhibition with the Memory Lab Project.
We worked with both 3-D installations and Video Installations. As it was a relatively open space we had to cordon off the sppaces for video installations with a combination of fake/false walls and cloth. On the up side as the exhibition went on till 8:00 PM we could manipulate the lighting to highlight the art.
Aftertastes
Aftertastes was the final exhibition for the first semester of this course. It was put up as a Museum and Gallery Practices team and the Memory Lab Project team collaboration.The exhibition was held in Rococo Gallery which was a fairly controlled space in comparison to Jaaga. There was balance mix of interactive art, video installations and 3-D installations.
All the art pieces tried to battle the "Do Not Touch" stereotype that came with an exhibiton at a gallery space.
In order to truly understand the need for a strong Curator-Artist relationship our team this time around not only played the role of exhibition designers but also acted as individual artists.
Mediating Modernities Exhibiton
The set up
Mediating Modernities Exhibition was a collaboration between our team and various students and faculty affliated with the Centre of Public History, Bangalore. This was the first exhibition of our second semester of the course.
