Guest lecture Rike Frank

Exhibiting: Encountering Temporalities

Exhibitions are often conceived as temporary constellations of works: As events marked by a beginning and an end. However, these arrangements embody themselves a series of temporal structures, they host, empower and mediate a variety of dynamics, rhythms and processes, moments of presence and absence, of gathering, displacement, alteration or open-endedness. Works not necessarily unfold their temporal dimension in sync with the exhibition’s opening or closing or the viewing time; they may exist in time but become manifest only through the act of exhibiting. How do these temporal dimensions affect the way we understand a work or practice? How do artists intervene, embrace or exhibit the experience of time? And how do exhibitions contribute to and mirror contemporary temporal conditions of structuring and being structured by time?

Rike Frank is Associated Professor of exhibition studies at the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo and a freelance writer and curator.