Manifesta Journal #9: History In The Present

Exhibitions are, by definition, ephemeral. They experience time dramatically. While the works displayed are usually destined to endure, the exhibition itself is condemned to disappear. From a historical perspective, the most authentic locus of an exhibition is arguably in the viewer’s memory. Not all exhibitions, however, are granted a place in history.

Is it true that the life of a work of art is phenomenologically autonomous from its contextual presentation in an exhibition? Is the exhibition a self-sufficient text that inevitably presumes that, after the exhibition, each work loses the particular meaning it had in the exhibition’s chain of signifiers?
And is it really true that the locus of the show is properly in the present (or in any actual time, for that matter)? Perhaps the temporality of an exhibition is more complex. Today, artistic sensibility seems imprisoned in the present, experiencing nostalgia for the future and dwelling on potentialities of the past. One of the paradoxical tasks of the contemporary curator might thus be to present a historical retrospective of context-dependent art, and thereby to defend the radicality of archival artworks.

An exceptional group of authors has been invited to contribute to the current Manifesta Journal issue, which provides the reader with a differentiated view on the topic of the History in the Present.
Within the section Positions, Mihnea Mircan discusses contemporary artistic and curatorial practices with regard to their mechanisms for processing art history, and suggests that artworks can function as historical objects as well as sites that forecast the future understanding of art. In the section Discourse, Stefan Heidenreich deals with the paradox of eternal contemporaneity, whereas Boris Groys’ essay interrogates the definition of contemporary art through the “excessive” or suspended time of time-based art.

Dialogues features an interview with Seth Siegelaub, one of the first independent curators and a chief proponent of conceptual art in the late 1960s. Within the section Studies, Sven Spieker equates curating with a pre-modern understanding of storytelling. The section Documents presents a reprint of a text by Marga van Mechelen in which she discusses three exhibitions that questioned the presentation of contemporary art in the late 1980s. Finally, Chiara Bertola provides an insight into the curatorial practice of the institutional space of the museum, drawing on the example of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in the section Practice.

MJ #9 includes contributions by: A*Desk, Zeigam Azizov, Chiara Bertola, Dessislava Dimova, Petja Grafenauer, Boris Groys, Stefan Heidenreich, Giovanni Iovane, Marga van Mechelen, Mihnea Mircan, Seth Siegelaub, Elena Sorokina, Sven Spieker and Nathalie Zonnenberg.