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This paper discusses five exhibitions curated by the author of what might be most broadly termed network-based art: Beyond Interface: net art and art on the net (1998), Art Entertainment Network (2000), Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace (2001), Open_Source_Art_Hack (2002), and Translocations (2003). While they took place after the invention of the http protocol, they represent an inflection point prior to the commodification of the technology of social media culture and explore formative practices by artists and institutions for current recensions of social media.

If you are standing on the shores of the Ottawa River looking at the Canadian Museum of History, the national library and archives and other national repositories of Aboriginal heritage, you might well despair at the comprehensive losses of curatorial expertise, programs of research, and will to work collaboratively with Aboriginal people which befell these institutions under the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Looking harder, however, neither the shifting political ideologies nor the era of financial constraint that began with the global financial crisis of 2008 seems to have thrown processes of decolonisation and pluralist representation that began to take root in Canada during the 1990s into reverse. Two exhibition projects that unfolded during that same period provide evidence of that the changes in historical consciousness of settler-indigenous relationships and the acceptance of cultural pluralism have provided a counterweight to the intentions of a right wing government to restore old historical narratives. This chapter discusses them as evidence of this deep and, seemingly, irreversible shift in Canadian public’s expectation s of museum representation. The first involves plans for the new exhibition of Canadian history being developed for the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation in 2017, specifically a fishing boat named the Nisga’a Girl which was presented by a west coast First Nation to mark the successful resolution of its land claim. The second is the Sakahan exhibition of global indigenous art shown in 2013 at the National Gallery of Canada and which marked a notable departure from its past scope. While utopia has by no means been achieved, neither, surprisingly, was dystopia realised during the years of conservative reaction.

Literary and art critic Andrea O’Reilly Herrera analyzes an itinerant art exhibition known as CAFÉ (Cuban American Foremost Exhibitions), curated by Leandro Soto (b. 1956) since 2001. O’Reilly Herrera argues that the artists participating in this exhibition raise many of the same issues as earlier vanguardia artists in Cuba, including the significance of the island’s African and Indigenous roots, landscape, and architecture, although they do not claim to represent the entire Cuban diaspora. Still, O’Reilly Herrera’s analysis of the artworks of several cafeteros, such as Soto, José Bedia, and Raúl Villarreal, identifies recurrent themes and common concerns, especially with displacement and transculturation that, in the end, “allude to the all-embracing nature of Cuban culture itself.”

In the age of empire, colonial promoters sought to mark the very landscape of France with reminders of France’s empire: statues, war memorials, museum collections and buildings. With decolonization, and a period of ‘colonial amnesia’ that followed it, the fate of these memorial sites was brought into question, many left neglected or viewed with discomfort. In recent years, France has rediscovered its colonial past (and its legacy in contemporary issues) and ‘repurposed’ some of the old monuments, though the treatment of extant memorials and the erection of new sites suggests the ambivalence still felt about the colonial past. This essay discusses lieux de mémoire in Paris and the provinces, placing the material heritage of colonialism in the context of the colonial and post-colonial periods and France’s confrontation with the imperial record.

Fern fever, or pteridomania, infected the popular imagination throughout the British empire in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Focusing on the work of Mary Ann Armstrong (1838-1910), this chapter considers the role played by New Zealand in feeding this craze. Armstrong’s pressed ferns were displayed at intercolonial and international exhibitions, where they received commendation and were gifted to dignitaries. Armstrong also sold fern albums in a market dominated by men, and was instrumental in founding the export business, the New Zealand Fern Company. In scope and scale, her South Pacific Fern Album (c. 1889) represents the culmination of her career as well as the evolution of the fern in nineteenth-century culture, blending its botanical, aesthetic, and commercial aspects together with the burgeoning discourses of tourism and nationalism.

Chapter Two considers how Shanghai Tang, a Hong Kong-founded fashion brand, exploits Shanghai’s imagined cosmopolitan legacy towards the building of a multinational luxury brand. The author considers the rising political tensions between Hong Kong and Shanghai, as Hong Kong was handed over from British to mainland Chinese rule in 1997. The chapter discusses a 1997 Shanghai Tang advertisement featuring Chinese actress Gong Li, addressing how the image signals the return of class-based society, while sanitizing mainland China’s immediate socialist past. This chapter also examines the powerful influence of Shanghai Tang’s founder, art collector Sir David Tang, on the international dissemination of contemporary Chinese art, exploring key Shanghainese painters promoted by Tang, including Yu Youhan, Wang Ziwei and Ding Yi. Referencing these artists’ connections to Shanghai Tang, and also the French fashion brand, Christian Dior, the chapter theorizes the rise of a contemporary Chinese art/fashion system. The final section focuses on Shanghai-based sculptor Liu Jianhua, who has been supported by both Tang and Christian Dior, and the artist’s subversion of mainland China’s presumed role as “the factory of the world” through his ceramic-based practice.

Chapter Three investigates the turn of the twenty-first century global expansion of Shanghai’s contemporary art vis-à-vis the first international iteration of China’s premier contemporary art event, the Chinese Communist Party-sponsored 2000 Shanghai. The chapter theorizes biennialization-as-banalization vis-à-vis contemporary exhibition practices and the promotion of contemporary Chinese art. The chapter argues that Shanghai Biennial’s curators’ hopes of harnessing the spirit of Shanghai were ultimately supplanted by a generic brand of global contemporary art that neglected the city’s unique historical features and current concerns. This chapter then examines critical responses to the 2000 Shanghai Biennial and critiques of the global positioning of Shanghai’s contemporary art as seen in Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi’s counter-exhibition “Fuck Off,” and in two related works by artists Zhou Tiehai and Yang Fudong.

The conclusion considers the continued, widespread proliferation of the staid East-meets-West trope through a critique of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2015 exhibition, “China: Through the Looking Glass.” Ruminating on the afterlives of East-meets-West exoticizations, the conclusion synthesizes the preceding ones by analyzing the exhibition’s loaded cross-cultural hybrids of art-fashion-celebrity culture and Sino-US corporate sponsorship. The chapter argues that “China: Through the Looking Glass” might have countered the critique that the exhibition did not adequately present contemporary Chinese culture by including some of the art and design projects presented throughout the book, summarizing the vital issues these projects raise.

This chapter introduces the importance of text and images of writing for feminist art practices in the late 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with the 2008 exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, it demonstrates that an engagement with language was a significant part of women artists’ efforts to resist the ways in which late-twentieth-century visual culture reinforces the idea that women should serve as the other of patriarchal culture. The introduction presents the three artists who are the focus of the book – Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly – and argues that the ‘writerly’ qualities of the artwork they produced in the 1970s undermines the visual dominance of spectacle culture and the production of woman as a sign that represents passivity and sexual availability. The introduction also makes a case for pairing the artwork of Piper, Spero, and Kelly with the writings of Angela Davis, Valerie Solanas, and Laura Mulvey. In aligned historical contexts, these writers also addressed the limited range of images through which women were allowed to appear, and thereby suggest what it means to receive the artwork’s call to other women to collaborate on the project of creating a feminist imaginary.

This chapter considers the putative area of ‘American Constructivism’, a formation that did not have any organisational substance but existed as a number of respectively interconnected and discrete tendencies. Two exhibitions organised by The Little Review—the International Theatre Exposition (1926) and the Machine-Age Exposition(1927)—contained the largest amount of Constructivist works on display in the USA in the interwar years, in the form of theatre and architectural designs. The chapter charts the emergence of Constructivism and its reception in America. For the most part, the introduction of Constructivism into the USA involved the depoliticisation of the original Soviet version. Whilst largely apolitical, the exhibitions organised by The Little Review were unique in terms of the organisers’ grasp of Constructivist discourses and techniques, being informed by the International Constructivism of De Stijl via Austrian émigré Frederick Kiesler. The Machine-Age Exposition was notable for its detailed presentation of Soviet architecture, and therefore the chapter includes an extensive analysis of debates around functionalism, culminating in a consideration of the development of the International Style at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

This chapter situates Hōgai’s painting production within broader artistic trends of the 1880s, when the style and subject matter of Japanese painting first became a topic of outright debate. This development solidified the existence of the category of nihonga on a discursive plane well before nihonga became a named entity in ostensible contrast to yōga, or Western (oil) painting.

Since 1971, despite the influence of Brown's World of Late Antiquity, many of the old arguments have resurfaced, with strong arguments in favour both of Roman continuity and of destruction caused by the barbarians. What has been new has been the presentation of ideas about the late Roman and early Medieval period to the general public through the medium of the exhibition. There have been major exhibitions in most countries of Western Europe. Very often the theme and the title spells out a political message (either relating to European unity, as in the Die Franken exhibition, or to regional vitality (as in the Die Alamannen exhibition)). The Russian Europe without Borders exhibition acknowledged the plundering of German archaeological material in 1945, while the Copenhagen Spoils of Victory exhibition finally acknowledged the German right to the Nydam ship.

This chapter examines the participation of the Actresses' Franchise League in large immersive indoor suffrage exhibitions, fairs and bazaars, introducing their work within the context of the performative propaganda strategies of the wider suffrage movement and its interventions in public visually oriented space. Beginning with a particular focus on the WSPU Women’s Exhibition of 1909, this chapter considers representations of women and womanhood in suffrage plays and entertainments and how theatre and performance was used to explore issues of violence, imprisonment and activism.

In this chapter, Desmond compares the phemomena of dead human and dead animal body displays and explores which aspects of the conventions of taxidermy are carried over into Dr. Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds exhibitions of plastinated human cadavers. She suggests that even though both display bodies in aesthetically framed ways, the Body Worlds exhibit is a form of “antitaxidermy” and this distinction is key to the exhibit’s success. Through her analysis, Desmond shows how notions of human specificity, universality, and social differentiation are inscribed in or on the body in ways that are fundamentally different from those of nonhuman animals. She also discusses taxidermy, which she argues is a distinctive way of human relating with dead animals that melds uniqueness and genericism.

In this chapter, Desmond analyses the Body Worlds exhibit and the Animal Inside Out exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in terms of the arguments they present and their potential effects on viewers. She asks what is different between displays featuring human cadavers and those featuring dead animal bodies. Desmond argues that just as the human Body Worlds exhibits were, the animal exhibit is built on a series of omissions that construct its ultimate argument, but that these omissions differ from those that were essential to the human shows. Additionally, she discusses how the materialization of this newest exhibit takes place under a set of specific conditions of possibility, and those conditions are different for the human and the animal exhibits.

This chapter describes the standardisation of the English style of ballroom dance and the professionalisation of the dance community, showing that these processes were inextricably connected. The catalyst to the dance profession’s consolidation was a series of conferences convened in the 1920s by prominent teachers who sought to standardise the steps of new ballroom dances arriving in Britain from the United States and continental Europe. From these events emerged the rudimentary English style, which the profession then passed on to the dancing public via dancing schools, exhibition dancing, dance competitions and print culture. However, the chapter argues that the success – and even the steps and figures – of a dance were not determined entirely by this top-down process. Not only did a significant segment of the dancing public eschew instruction, and remain largely oblivious to professional activities, but the two groups were not always aligned in their dancing preferences. The result was that questions about which dances would be danced in Britain, how they would be performed, and what the gradually evolving national style would look like, were continually negotiated between producers and consumers of popular dance.