Exhibitions Have a History: Selected Texts

The book Exhibitions Have a History brings to the Czech environment selected translations of texts by well-known and lesser-known authors representing the basis of the discourse of exhibition histories – a field dealing with the history of exhibitions. They focus on the grammar of exhibitions, which has become an essential interpretive tool of contemporary art history.The three main chapters – Exhibition as a Medium, Trajectories of Exhibition Histories, and The Moment of Curating – illustrate specific research directions resonating in exhibition history. The first addresses, in general terms, the fundamental question of what an exhibition is and how it can currently be understood as a medium, as a specific locally and temporally determined cultural form or genre of modern art. The second chapter traces the different trajectories and ways in which these temporary exhibition representations of art are historicized and inscribed in the updated narratives of its history. The last then focuses its attention on the time-contingent development of the new curatorial profession, which has gradually established itself within the art establishment since the late 1960s and has gained a position as one of the most important chapters of exhibition history.The book is available only in Czech.