'Imaginary Exhibitions' conference at the Henry Moore Institute 6-7 November 2013

***Only £5 for students*** Book HERE

This two day conference explores imaginary exhibition projects, ranging from the utopian to the tentative, the immaterial to the highly materialised, through to those hampered by logistics or inscribed with impossibility from their inception.

This is a development of the Institute’s on-going research into 'Sculpture and its Exhibition Histories'. Through this project we address how developments in sculpture have impacted upon the spaces of exhibition, how the material conditions of the display of sculpture have played increasingly important roles in the meaning and making of sculpture as an art form, how the modes of presenting sculpture have shifted and how curatorial practice has impacted on the understanding of sculpture, and vice versa.

This conference seeks to look beyond formal records and more familiar images of sculpture and exhibitions by looking at the place of the 'imaginary exhibition' within this narrative. The motives and scales of such projects vary and instances of these 'imaginary exhibitions' are to be found internationally, across the modern and contemporary period. This turn to the ephemeral, invisible and ill-fated will draw out the eccentric and idiosyncratic in the shadows of art history, as opposed to the more usual highly-polished exhibition surface.

Wednesday 6 November

11.30-1: Session 1: The Imaginary Spaces of 1930s sculpture
Chair: Jon Wood (Henry Moore Institute)

Annabelle Goergen-Lammers (Hamburger Kunsthalle)
‘Alberto Giacometti: Progetti Per Cose Grandi Nel Aperto’

Sophie Martin (University of Bristol)
‘‘Constructing Space’: Transcribing sculpture in Circle; International Survey of Constructive Art (1937)’

1-2: Lunch in boardroom

2-3.30: Session 2: Sculpture’s Staging and Scenography
Chair: Lisa Le Feuvre (Henry Moore Institute)

Paola Nicolin (Luigi Bocconi University)
‘The ‘Me’ You Will Never See: Maurizio Cattelan Backstage Exhibition at Guggenheim New York’

John C. Welchman (University of California, San Diego)
‘Rigging: The Imaginary as Studio-Production in the work of Paul McCarthy’

3.30-4.15: Tea in boardroom

4.15-5.45: Session 3: Exhibitions without sculptures
Chair: John C. Welchman (University of California, San Diego)

Filipa Ramos (Independent Curator)
‘I Would Prefer Not To – A Taxonomy of Artists Without Works’

Jeremy Millar (Artist/Royal College of Art)
‘Sculpture of the Space Age’

5.45-7: Wine reception and publication launches: Sculpture and the Vitrine and My Life by Anton Lesseman, with John Welchman and Paul Becker, respectively

Thursday 7 November

9.30-11: Session 4: Unrealised and invisible exhibitions
Chair: Rebecca Wade (HMF Post-Doctoral Fellow, Henry Moore Institute)

Tania Doropoulos (Royal College of Art)
‘The 1959 Situationist International Dynamic Labyrinth at the Stedelik Museum’

Dawna Schuld (Indiana University)
‘Nothing to Show for It: Art and Technology in the age of de-materialization’

11-11.30: Coffee break

11.30-1: Session 4: Invisible and unrealised exhibitions
Chair: Lisa Le Feuvre (Henry Moore Institute)

Birgit Eusterschulte (Freie Universität)
‘From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion: Robert Barry’s Presentation of Inert Gas Series in California’

Penelope Curtis (Tate Britain)
On not exhibiting Robert Morris’ work

Lunch 1-2pm

2-3.30: Session 5: Photographic and digital imaginary exhibitions
Chair: Uta Kogelsberger (Newcastle University)

Magdalena Wroblewska (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut)
‘‘Le muse imaginaire’: between material object and its virtual representation’

Angela Bartholomew (Vrije Universiteit)
‘Marble Public and the Agency of Media(tion)’

3.30: End of conference