Drawing on a series of exhibitions curated and installed at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal throughout the 1990s and the early millennium, this essay analyzes how architecture and its representation in museological exhibitions have innovated forms of communication and display practices, transcending the traditions established by the fine arts paradigm since the late eighteenth century. The author argues that in addition to providing a heightened recognition of the narrative and performative potential of the exhibitionary setting, the discourses and (...) tensions specific to architecture and architectural practice have led to a rethinking of the communicative potential of the exhibition environment. Principles inherent to architecture—spatiality, materiality, and the experiential—are fruitful when considering the possibilities of exhibition design to elucidate multiple levels of meaning, and these principles have led to architecture’s coming-of-age in the museological environment in ways that are specific to re aedificatoria—the art of building itself. (shrink)

Aborder l’exposition comme média implique de considérer le point de vue du producteur (commissaire), celui du récepteur (visiteur) et celui de l’exposition (à travers les moyens employés et l’aspect de l’architecture communiqué). Deux manières d’envisager la communication de l’architecture au musée sont abordées. Pour la première, et selon nous la plus ancienne, le terme architecture est pris au sens de bâtiment. Les commissaires tentent alors de transmettre à la fois l’expérience et la matérialité du bâtiment. Pour la seconde manière, apparue (...) ces vingt dernières années, c’est plutôt le projet architectural (idée, processus, bâtiment et représentations) que l’on communique. La communication de l’idée et du processus semble être une tendance forte qui cible la pratique architecturale. Cette réflexion critique mène au constat suivant : d’un point de vue communicationnel, l’exposition d’architecture oublie trop souvent de considérer son destinataire, et les commissaires n’utilisent donc pas son plein potentiel comme média. (shrink)

La notion d’expologie est relativement récente : ce néologisme est apparu au cours des années 1990, dans la littérature muséologique, pour évoquer l’étude des expositions d’un point de vue théorique. Cet article tente de rassembler les différents éléments pouvant être mis en œuvre dans le contexte d’une telle étude, depuis les premières illustrations de catalogues de cabinets de curiosités, les textes plus théoriques apparaissant à partir du 18ème siècle, jusqu’à la littérature contemporaine visant à analyser ce dispositif particulier que constitue (...) l’exposition, et notamment le secteur des études de visiteurs. (shrink)

This essay examines Meera Margaret Singh’s exhibition Nightingale in the time and place of the liminal space we call “hotel.” In intertexual dialogue with Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory, the author not only reviews Singh’s intimate photographs of her mother, she reads the images with and against the architecture in which they are exhibited. The Gladstone as exhibition space redoubles Singh’s emphasis on the tense connectivity of apparent binaries: youth and age, public and private, artist and model, object and spectator, living (...) and dying. The quotidian activities of hotel living—guests’ arrivals, departures, and returns—become inextricable pieces of Singh’s site-specific installation. The author theorizes what Freud calls the “foretaste of mourning” in this work, grappling with what will be but is not yet the death of the mother. Singh’s Nightingale proposes that we do not “work through” mourning: mourning is a perpetual way of being in the present. (shrink)

[Interactive and Immersive Practices; Critical Spatial Practices. The Augmented Reality of the Exhibition Space] The rise of installations, as well as immersive and interactive spaces, in both art and science museums has accustomed the public to heightened interactivity, leading to a better understanding of social, natural and scientific phenomena. These spatial systems have also paved the way for the production of innovative environments within exhibition design. This article aims to present a brief overview of the origins of immersive and sensory (...) practices at work in contemporary museums, and to evaluate the potential of these processes to generate critical thinking in the visitor. A concise description of the evolution of the operational and intellectual premise of these museums and their changing practices demonstrates the transformations that have occurred, their modalities, and their application in selected works, notably: The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson presented at Tate Modern London; Diller + Scofidio’s media pavilion, Blur Building, in Yverdon-les-Bains in Switzerland; and the exhibition Sense of the City at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. (shrink)