Ronald Kolb
Post-Exhibitionary Practice

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https://www.arko.or.kr/artcenter/board/view/510?bid=&page=2&cid=715915

https://www.academia.edu/166137940/Performing_Exhibitionary_Infrastructures

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Ronald Kolb, “Performing Exhibitionary Infrastructures,” pp. 32–37

In: Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone
Eds. Hamin Kim & Seoyoun Chang
Exhibition catalogue, ARKO Art Center, January 2025
ISBN 978-89-6583-030-6
209 pp.

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The text argues that exhibiting contemporary art is never just displaying objects, but an infrastructural, performative and governmental practice — entangled with funding, institutional politics and knowledge production. Drawing on the “performative turn” (the idea that all human behavior, including curating itself, is a performative act that can reproduce or alter power structures), it applies this framework to the exhibition Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone.

Two works ground the argument: San Keller staged a Korean bed and, working through local collaborators, spent days in intimate conversations with visitors about their sleeping rituals — described as building a „human-based infrastructure“ out of the exhibition itself. Maya Minder’s Green Open Food Evolution paired an algae-focused installation with a cooking workshop, MICUL MICUL, where participants prepared and ate algae-based recipes together, surfacing questions of food’s ecological footprint and more-than-human, bacterial interdependence. Both, the text concludes, push exhibitions past looking and reading toward embodied, collective doing — turning the show into a living contact zone rather than a fixed display of objects.