Things in Contemporary Curating: The Aesthetics of the Right to Assemble and the Need to Withdraw

Through close readings of key exhibitions, Things in Contemporary Curating develops a new aesthetic, an ‘aesthetics of the thing’. Here the word ‘thing’ is understood in its original meaning, namely as an object, a form of political gathering, and a topic. It encompasses exhibitions that use democratic meetings as a curatorial approach, and asks, If the exhibition space were a space for democratic gatherings, how would it look?

The roots of this contemporary tendency ‘aesthetics of the thing’ are traced back, through an international historical gaze, to the organisation of exhibitions as alliance and solidarity-shaping events in the postwar era. Nelund shows how this development found its way into European and North American exhibition practices from the 1990s on, and is now integrated in the exhibition practices of places such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and MoMA in New York