From the 1980s onward, certain exhibitions began to move beyond the conventional model of displaying and viewing artworks, transforming the exhibition itself into an opportunity for reflection, experience, and engagement with complex issues. In these projects, philosophy, architecture, technology, science, and politics play an active role in shaping both the space and the viewer’s experience. Despite their historical and theoretical differences, the following four examples demonstrate how an exhibition can transcend its role as a “site for displaying artworks” and become a space for experiencing an idea.
Les Immatériaux, 1985
Grande Galerie, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Curators: Jean-François Lyotard and Thierry Chaput
In 1985, the Centre Pompidou in Paris presented a project that, from the outset, departed from the conventional format of an art exhibition. Les Immatériaux, curated by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and the design theorist Thierry Chaput, was presented in the Grande Galerie of the Centre Pompidou. The project sought to create an intellectual and sensory experience of the transformations taking place in the world on the threshold of the technological age.
Lyotard and Chaput used the French term manifestation to describe the project. They deliberately avoided calling it an exhibition, seeking to distinguish it both from the conventions of art exhibitions and from the tradition of universal exhibitions devoted to science and technology.
The aim was to create a new experience of navigating exhibition space, one that would confront visitors with the early signs of an emerging computerized society, a society that was expected to transform humanity’s relationship with the world and the ways in which information was produced, transmitted, and received.
The open exhibition space, covering approximately 2,300 square metres, was designed to lead visitors away from a fixed and predictable route. A fluid spatial arrangement, combined with varying degrees of visual filtering, sound pieces transmitted through infrared headphones, and moving strips carrying text, created an unfamiliar and somewhat disorienting environment. Within this space, visitors simultaneously saw, listened, read, and moved.
The exhibition comprised a series of “sites” that brought artworks into encounter and dialogue with a range of visual, scientific, and technological tools and elements. These encounters were organized around five key concepts: matter, instrument, origin, substance, and matrix.
Much of the significance of the project lay in its redefinition of the position of the exhibition itself. In 1985, when digital technology had not yet entered everyday life in anything resembling its present form, Les Immatériaux attempted to make the cultural and epistemological consequences of emerging information technologies the subject of experience in advance. The central question was how changes in the production, transmission, and reception of information might transform perception, knowledge, and humanity’s relationship to reality.
Deconstructivist Architecture, 1988
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
Curators: Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley
In 1988, The Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted an exhibition that became a significant moment in the history of contemporary architecture. Deconstructivist Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, was one of the landmark exhibitions to bring the philosophical concept of deconstruction into architectural discourse and to demonstrate how a philosophical idea could be translated into the language of form, space, and structure. The exhibition ran from June 23 to August 30, 1988.
The exhibition brought together the work of seven architects: Coop Himmelb(l)au, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and Bernard Tschumi. The works presented consisted primarily of architectural drawings, models, plans, and documents relating to architectural projects. A selection of Russian avant-garde works from 1913 to 1933 was also presented, providing a historical and visual context for the architectural projects.
The significance of the exhibition lay in its presentation of deconstruction as a restless and questioning approach to established architectural principles. In the projects of these seven architects, the geometric order, symmetry, unity, and clarity associated with modern architecture were challenged through fragmentation, displacement, diagonal lines, complex surfaces, and forms that appeared unstable or in motion. What brought these projects together was a certain skepticism toward the idea of architecture as a coherent, stable, and fully intelligible structure. Forms seemed to be disrupted from within. Lines and volumes pressed against one another, placing the conventional order of architecture in a state of instability.
Mark Wigley also emphasized in the exhibition catalogue that these seven architects did not constitute a single “movement” or style. What brought them together was rather a temporary and uneasy point of intersection among different approaches, each of which questioned architectural order in its own way.
The mode of presentation also differed from conventional exhibitions of painting and sculpture. Instead of encountering a collection of autonomous works, visitors were confronted with architectural models, drawings, plans, and documents relating to the design process. What was placed on view, therefore, was in part the process of thinking about space and structure.
The concept of deconstruction in Jacques Derrida’s theory played an important role in shaping the exhibition’s theoretical framework. Here, deconstruction functioned as a way of revealing the tensions and contradictions embedded within seemingly coherent structures.
The exhibition can therefore be regarded as an important example of a theoretical exhibition, whose significance lay in the framework it constructed for seeing and comparing works. A range of ideas, processes, and spatial possibilities acquired meaning through their juxtaposition.
Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics, 2020–2022
ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Curators: Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel, Martin Guinard, and Bettina Korintenberg
In 2020, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in Germany presented Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics, an exhibition conceived as a kind of thought experiment and epistemic apparatus. The project began with a scientific concept from the Earth sciences and expanded it into a philosophical, political, and cultural question concerning humanity’s relationship with the Earth. The exhibition’s accompanying Fieldbook describes the project as a journey through six interconnected sections.
In the Earth and environmental sciences, the Critical Zone refers to the relatively thin layer of the Earth’s surface in which interactions among rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms create the conditions necessary for life. Bruno Latour transformed this scientific concept into a broader question: if human and nonhuman life depends upon such a fragile and complex layer, how should our relationship with the Earth, territory, resources, and other forms of life be understood?
The exhibition emerged against the backdrop of the climate crisis and what Latour referred to as the New Climatic Regime. At stake was the need to reconsider our conception of the Earth. In the project’s account, modern humans simultaneously inhabit an Earth that serves as the basis for political belonging and the formation of territories, and an Earth from which resources, energy, and wealth are extracted. The project sought to distinguish these two conceptions of the Earth from one another and then make their relationship visible once again.
One of the exhibition’s defining features was its repositioning of the visitor. The exhibition space was transformed into a series of observatories, in which visitors were not merely observers of artworks but participants in a process of knowledge production. To accompany this experience, a Fieldbook was designed. The Fieldbook proposed one of several possible routes through the exhibition and functioned as an instrument for navigating and reading its different narratives, works, and bodies of information.
The exhibition was organized into six main sections:
1. Starting to Observe: A Critical Zone Observatory
2. We Don’t Live Where We Are: Ghost Acreages
3. We Live inside Gaia
4. Earth Tidings
5. Redrawing Territories
6. Becoming Terrestrial
These official section titles are important because they reveal the intellectual trajectory of the project. Along this path, the Earth emerges as a complex network of relationships and interactions, within which humans constitute only one element.
Consequently, artworks in this project were selected neither solely for aesthetic purposes nor simply to illustrate a scientific or philosophical theory. Art was placed alongside Earth sciences, philosophy, literature, architecture, data, maps, documents, and research in order to approach the question of the Earth from multiple perspectives.
One of the most significant curatorial aspects of the project was the correspondence between the form of the exhibition and its subject. If the Earth is understood as a complex, unstable, and multilayered network, the exhibition itself cannot present a completely linear and straightforward narrative. Visitors must move among narratives, data, artworks, maps, and different situations, and through this movement locate themselves within a broader network of human and nonhuman relations.
The coincidence of the project’s opening with the COVID-19 pandemic led to the addition of a digital platform to the exhibition’s structure, which became part of the experience itself. The project thus expanded across two interconnected spaces, the physical and the digital, while also questioning the boundary between the in-person exhibition and the online environment.
Critical Zones stands as an important example of an exhibition that transformed contemporary philosophy into a spatial, sensory, and participatory experience, with its structure functioning as a laboratory for thinking about the relationship between humans and the Earth.
You and I Don't Live on the Same Planet, 2020–2021
Taipei Biennial 2020, Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Curators: Bruno Latour and Martin Guinard, with Eva Lin
The 12th Taipei Biennial, titled You and I Don't Live on the Same Planet, was one of Bruno Latour’s major exhibition projects. It emerged at a moment when the climate crisis, global inequalities, and geopolitical tensions had become increasingly intertwined. Rather than presenting a single image of the contemporary world, Latour and Martin Guinard began from the premise that humans effectively inhabit different worlds, worlds in which conceptions of the Earth, resources, borders, security, and the future are not the same.
The project took the form of an imaginary planetarium, a structure composed of five fictional planets, each representing a different way of imagining the world and humanity’s relationship with the Earth. These planets were the Globalization Planet, the Security Planet, the Escape Planet, Planet Terrestrial, and a Planet with Different Gravity.
On the Globalization Planet, the dream of modernization and the expansion of economic networks, regardless of planetary boundaries and limitations, constituted the central theme. The Security Planet belonged to a world that, in response to the consequences of globalization, turned toward the construction of walls, borders, and mechanisms of separation. The Escape Planet portrayed the desire of privileged groups to escape terrestrial crises, even to the point of settling on Mars.
By contrast, Planet Terrestrial sought another possibility: finding a balance between economic prosperity and the limits of the Earth’s resources, while accepting the fact that human life is inseparable from an extensive network of terrestrial beings and processes.
The Planet with Different Gravity was devoted to those who, in search of another refuge, turn toward metaphysical worlds and systems of belief.
This structure made the Biennial function less like a linear collection of artworks and more like an intellectual planetarium. Visitors entered an imagined world in which each planet possessed its own logic, values, and conception of the future.
Within this structure, Planet Terrestrial occupied a particularly important position. This section addressed an idea that had become increasingly significant in Latour’s later thought: becoming terrestrial, understood as a redefinition of humanity’s relationship with the Earth and with the network of beings, resources, and material conditions that make life possible.
One of the significant projects within this section was Arts of Coming Down to Earth, 2020, by Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro with Margaret Shiu and Ming-Jiun Tsai. The project turned the question toward the exhibition itself: how much environmental impact does an art exhibition generate? Using greenhouse-gas emission tracking tools and sets of data, the artists mapped the ecological consequences of Taipei Biennial 2020, from the production of artworks and artists’ travel to transportation and museum cooling. In this way, the project placed the material existence and environmental footprint of exhibition-making itself under scrutiny.
The significance of the project, however, was not limited to its Taipei iteration. Centre Pompidou-Metz subsequently adapted the project and presented an exhibition under the same title in French.
Taken together, these four projects, spanning nearly four decades, trace a trajectory in which the exhibition gradually shifts from a neutral space for presenting artworks toward an intellectual, spatial, and experience-based structure. From the sensory and technological experience of Les Immatériaux, and the translation of deconstruction into the language of architecture in Deconstructivist Architecture, to the transformation of the Earth crisis into an intellectual observatory in Critical Zones and the construction of conflicting worlds in You and I Don't Live on the Same Planet, space, the movement of the visitor, architecture, and modes of presentation all become part of the exhibition’s thinking itself. The exhibition, in these examples, becomes a medium for experience and thought.