Infrastructures of the Exhibitionary

This essay aims to locate “exhibition instances” outside the strict realm of art display, museums and galleries, in parallel with other modes of knowledge production (academic and non-academic epistemes), and of intervention in human and non-human worlds. By acknowledging the exhibition mechanisms in the expanded field of the art exhibition we can recognise the exhibitionary qualities of the forms and materials set up intentionally and/or unintentionally as being-in-relation—in an ecosystemic scale—and which subsequently inform our experiences and shape the way we make sense of the world and create new meanings. This text discusses the possibility of mobilising the “infrastructure of the exhibitionary”—as the network and mechanisms of ecosystemic exposures of forms and materials that constitute our ecologies—to carve out an arena of practice and research in the Arts and Humanities to analyse and intervene in the field of aesthetics and its politics. This attempt does not ignore the valuable developments in art history, art criticism, museum studies, curating and art practice. Rather, the expanded notion of the exhibitionary, which I am advocating for, complements work realised within these fields, at the same time that it recognises the perimeter of its intervention to be in close dialogue and proximity with the analysis of cultural phenomena provided by cultural studies and visual cultures.