1. The exhibition is not neutral: medium, apparatus, situation. An introduction to exhibition studies: the exhibition as an arrangement of gaze, movement, time, text, authority, and attention; from the nineteenth-century “exhibitionary complex” to the contemporary exhibition as a discursive, affective, and material infrastructure. (Tony Bennett, Carol Duncan, Bruce W. Ferguson, Reesa Greenberg, Sandy Nairne)

2. The exhibition between document and event: exhibiting ephemeral events, performances, protests, temporary installations, and historical exhibitions. Reconstruction, reenactment, remake, and reprise as modes of making the past present, each of which redefines what is preserved, who may speak for the past, and what status a document acquires; critical actualisation as well as the aestheticisation or neutralisation of history; the changing meaning of the “original” in conceptual, performance, and participatory art. (Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, MoMA, 2010; Jeremy Deller’s reenactments; reconstructions of unofficial, action-based, conceptual, and performance practices after 1989; Alexandra Pirici)

3. Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form – Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969): artworks understood as processes, situations, gestures, material experiments, and temporary interventions; the exhibition space as a collective open studio. documenta 5 (Harald Szeemann, Kassel, 1972): the exhibition as an authorially composed exhibitionary world. “Befragung der Realität – Bildwelten heute,” individual mythologies, political iconography, advertising, kitsch, science fiction, and outsider art; the exhibition as a social space in which the question of what counts as art is posed anew. (Harald Szeemann, Joseph Beuys)

4. Les Immatériaux (Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput, Centre Pompidou, 1985): relations between technology, language, materials, and knowledge. An experiment in spatial design beyond the linear sequence of white-cube spaces; interface, visitor disorientation, sound navigation, mediation, and “immateriality.” A critique of immateriality through the material basis of digital environments in mining, data centres, energy systems, logistics, and labour.

5. Magiciens de la Terre (Jean-Hubert Martin, Paris, 1989): globality, asymmetry, and an attempt to disrupt the Eurocentric canon through the parallel representation of artists from different parts of the world. Critiques of exoticisation, the ethnographic gaze, and the category of authenticity; universalism, plurality, representation, appropriation, and the persistence of unequal frameworks more radically challenged by later postcolonial curatorial practices. (Rasheed Araeen, Thomas McEvilley, James Clifford)

6. documenta11 (Okwui Enwezor, 2002): postcoloniality and the transformation of a major international exhibition into a transnational epistemic platform. The project’s five platforms connected discussions, workshops, film and video programmes across four continents around democracy, truth and reconciliation, urbanity, migration, borders, and globalisation. The Kassel exhibition developed these issues through The Black Box, documentary practices, film, and the question of diasporic modernity. (Okwui Enwezor)

7. documenta fifteen (ruangrupa, Kassel, 2022): a curatorial framework based on lumbung, the Indonesian term for a communal rice barn. Collective organising, the creation of shared resources, their distribution, and more equitable forms of exchange. Debates concerning historical and political interpretations of images, public funding, institutional responsibility, media polarisation, and the limits of transcultural translation.

8. Reconstructing East European art and inventing the East: “Eastern Europe,” the Balkans, and post-socialist transformation as art-historical and curatorial categories after 1989. Geographical shortcuts