El ensayo de la exposición (1977-2017). BOOK PRESENTATION

Tuesday, 14 October, at 18:00 in Bastida Hall, Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao.

Presentation of the book El ensayo de la exposición (1977-2017), published by the Concreta publishing house, that collects the papers presented at the symposium on curating of the same name. The symposium was a collaborative project developed by Bulegoa z/b and Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao with the aim of studying exhibitions that took place between 1977 and 2017.

EL ENSAYO DE LA EXPOSICIÓN (1977-2017)
An exhibition is a grouping of objects gathered temporarily together in a particular physical space. The visitor encounters forms; artefacts brought together in the same space and time. This circumstance enables the visitor to walk through the space creating itineraries, and allows a direct, although mediated encounter between their body and the objects. An exhibition is also a dispositif where things can unfold and overflow, also in the same spatial and temporal framework. The polysemic Spanish word ensayo refers both to a text –a reflexive or discursive literary work– and to an initial effort or attempt, an experimental process. The title El ensayo de la exposición 1977-2017 thus refers to two meanings of the same object: the exhibition as a place where thinking is produced, but also as a field where things can be tested out.

The symposium on curating El ensayo de la exposición (1977-2017) –freely translated in English as The Papers of the Exhibition (1977-2017)– consisted of five meetings held between 2016 and 2023 in Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao. The aim of the meetings was to study exhibitions held in a period spanning forty years. They involved more than thirty readings of as many exhibitions from recent history, enabling an approach to different aspects of the exhibition: a cultural object that reflects and reacts to the historical conditions in which it takes place; an institutional form that legitimises the representations it includes; an ephemeral device that can generate interruptions and cause moments of attention…

Contributions by: Carla Zaccagnini, Luca Frei, Aurora Fernández Polanco, Franco «Bifo» Berardi, Bojana Kunst, Adrian Heathfield, Dora García, Tamara Díaz Bringas, Joaquín Vázquez, Rachel Weiss, Aimar Arriola, Ines Schaber, Corinne Desirens, Catherine David, Yaiza Hernández Velázquez, Maria Lind, Ana Dević, Ruth Noack, Azucena Vieites, Lisette Lagnado, McKenzie Wark, Azar Mahmoudian in conversation with Rike Frank y Beatrice von Bismark, Arantza Santesteban, Anja Isabel Schneider, Anik Fournier, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson.