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When making my rounds to art galleries and other important contemporary art venues, I love observing the audience’s faces while they are at an exhibition. You would be surprised at just how many of these people look confused.
What is that?
Why is that considered art?
What does it mean?
Something I almost never see, however, is someone asking the artist or a gallery worker these same questions. But why? Because they are afraid asking questions will make them appear stupid, uncool, or irrelevant.
This observation was the basis of the project „This is not part of the exhibition“. The set of artworks in the exhibition will consist of pictures or videos of things, animals, or persons (static or in movement) that don’t actually belong to the current exhibition at an art gallery — BUT COULD — in a funny or ironic way. For example: Insert external objects into the art gallery or space and then take photos or videos. Taking pictures or video of the people or pets walking through the exhibition, etc. Other creative ideas are welcome and may also occur spontaneously. The project is been organized by ARC and DHAdmann and executed by 9 artists (DHAdmann, Patricia Fesser, Alice Hall, Gwen Varsluis, Jonas Lucas, Justina del Corte, Lucas Agudelo, Niko Mitsuko, Pao Kitsch) in Berlin and Madrid in December 2015. Some of these artworks are already available down below in this document.
The execution of this project, however, is still in progress. The exhibition will be take place in Berlin from the 29 until 31 of January, 2016 at a common and un-institutionalized space, a Turkish Cafe. The exhibition will also be an “artwork” because it will take place in a space that is also ‘Not part of the exhibition.’
Organizing this project brought up some good questions:
Does the exhibition space have any influence on the appreciation or understanding of an art work or artist?
Does the exhibition space contribute to the popularity of an artist?
Does an exhibition space determine whether an art work is good or bad?
Because the answer to all of these questions is, unfortunately, yes, it’s time that we as artists and art appreciators demand the separation of institution from the quality of the art and artists.
The concept behind this project addresses the need to democratize one of the main variables currently ruling the art world, the exhibition space. The current system determines whether or not an artwork is ‘good’, ’bad’, ‘high’, or ‘low’ based on whether or not the exhibition’s institution has a good reputation. Because of this, an artist must align themselves with a particular institution in order to gain value for their art work.
The exhibition of ‘This is not part of the exhibition’ is being organized in a space that has nothing to do with the exhibition itself because a space is a space and nothing else. It is our minds that correlate the fame and prestige of the institution with the particular exhibition. Therefore, the exhibition of this project is also an experiment to see if people can separate the importance of the space in the institutional world from the ‘value’ of the exhibition, art works and artists. In order to evaluate the exhibition, we will measure the opinions of people who attend including artists, art critics, and art lovers, before and after the show. Find the ranking options below:
DHAdmann Interventions
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”1″ gal_title=”dhadmann -this-is-not-part-of-the-exhibition”]
Alice Hall
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”2″ gal_title=”Alice Hall – This is not part of the exhibition”]Jonas Lucas
Lucas Agudelo
Gwen Versluis
Niko Mitsuko
Pao Kitsch
Justina del Corte
Patricia Fesser