Of(f) Our Times: Curatorial Anachronics

Exhibitions are tightly intertwined with the processes of historiography, creating dynamic and plural relations among and beyond participants both human and nonhuman. They are able to connect different histories while writing history themselves, their reciprocal relationships making them a complex object and transformative agent in historical research. Although it is precisely these abilities that have led to the current intense engagement with exhibition history, the question of what exhibition history as a practice and method entails remains largely under-discussed. As a collection of conversations, essays, artists’ projects, and inserts, this book aims to draw attention to the effects of a practice of exhibition history stemming from research and the curatorial. Through methodological considerations, interventions in existing historiographies, and proposals for new modes of referencing, the contributions work with exhibition history—and embody it themselves.

Of(f) Our Times: Curatorial Anachronics highlights exhibition history’s decisive role in revising existing histories and testing new modes of narrating and relation building. The publication reflects on how the field factors into a heightened interest in the social and political impact of exhibitions across different times and places. As a reciprocal practice, this alters our knowledge of exhibitions and their aftermath: their continued, trans-institutional, trans-temporal, plural existence in the present and the future.