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The Berlin-based art historian and author of How to Do Things with Art – The Meaning of Art’s Performativity, Dorothea von Hantelmann, gives a lecture and demonstration titled The Exhibition Ritual discussing her research into the shifting nature of audience engagement and exhibitions as ritual sites.
Art exhibitions are deeply linked to the values and categories that constitute a given time, whose socio-economic order they mirror and whose basic parameters they practice and enact. Dorothea von Hantelmann’s lecture/demonstration sketches the development of exhibitions from the 16th century to the present day, establishes connections to the respective social economic situation and argues that the transformations of our epoch are asking for a new kind of ritual, in which situatedness plays a key role.
Part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘Big Ideas’ talk series – a platform for renowned speakers, from scholars and thinkers to curators and artists, to share and discuss their current research and work.
Supported by the Stanley Picker Trust.
Dorothea von Hantelmann is an art historian and curator, based in Berlin. She was documenta Professor at the Art Academy/University of Kassel where she lectured on the history and meaning of documenta. Her main fields of research are contemporary art and theory as well as the history and theory of exhibitions. She is author of How to Do Things with Art (2010), has written on artists such as Jeff Koons, Daniel Buren, Philippe Parreno and Tino Sehgal, and co-edited the volume The exhibition. Politics of a Ritual (2010).
