This last seminar by the independent curator Sohyun Ahn, held on April 22nd, was based on the subject of the ‘intervention of the curator’, centering on the history of exhibition display. The activities of a curator have been expanding recently, from the role of determining the visual images of the exhibition, to the distinctive realm of creativity of the artist by commissioning works. This seminar shed light on the multiple angles of the intervention of the curator — from selecting and classifying works, imbuing meaning on displaying, and commissioning works and projects — which permeate the façade and inside of the art gallery today.

First, selecting and classifying works is a very unique realm of thinking in the sense that the work can be newly read according to what ideas it is classified. Andre Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas constructed a virtual exhibition space through 2-dimensional art images, and allowed the ‘non-temporal’ rotation between the images that traverse across times and spaces. While this demonstrated that the representation of narrative structure is possible merely by arranging images without text, it also proposed yet another possibility in exhibition composition which freely traversed time and space. It is evident that the selection and sequencing of works is an imperative aspect of the curator’s creative activity, as the curator can create new contexts.

The workshop also looked at the various external structures that constitute the exhibition. The viewer’s intuitive judgements and attitude in reading the works in the exhibition are largely affected by the ‘colors’ and ways of ‘displaying’ of the works on the physical walls of the exhibition space. This demonstrates that the external structure of the exhibition space plays a major role in the reading of the exhibition. The seminar retraced the history and origin of the external structure of the exhibition space, from looking at the ‘white cube’, which is a commonly accepted notion of the gallery space today, and the question as to why the gallery wall is white. The history of the white cube does not go back too long. The gallery today is an outcome of the idea of the ‘white cube’ by Alfred Barr Jr., who was the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in 1940s. The salon in 19th to early 20th century used reddish colors as the main color of the wall, and experiments were conducted with the wall color to fit the purpose of the exhibition. Also, the method of hanging paintings on the wall from ceiling to floor also reflected the objective of the exhibition culture at the time which valued the viewing of the entire collection rather than the reading and criticism of the individual art work. Such method of displaying art was seen in the first International Dada Fair in 1920, and changed every year until it became something similar to the display method seen today. The ‘hanging method’ after 1920s was used more enthusiastically in constructing the overall context of the exhibition. Examples of this were looked at in the seminar, through the exhibition Road to Victory, including works such as El Lissitzky’s Abstract Room, which focused more on the gaze and trace of movement of the viewer, and Herbert Bayer’s Applied Arts Exhibition which delivered political incitement.

Harald Szeemann’s exhibition When Attitude Becomes Form, one of the most important exhibitions in the history of modern and contemporary art, is a monumental exhibition in which the overall realm of the exhibition was completed through the active intervention of the curator. Szeemann’s intervention at the time had tremendous influence in defining the modern curatorial practice. In the gallery today, the relationship between the receiver and producer of art is more horizontal and participation-oriented than ever before. It’s evident that more thinking and ideas are needed in exhibition composition and method to present the exhibition as a space which goes beyond the primary reading of art, to exchanging of various ideas and experiences.