Abstract
The Third Guangzhou Triennial, Farewell to Post-Colonialism (2008) was intended by its international team of curators as a return to a searching deconstructivist critique of the relationship between identity and social inequality. This article seeks to problematize that intended significance by drawing attention to ways in which the position adopted by the curators of the exhibition was rendered critically ineffective as a result of the deterritorializing effects of localized discursive restrictions on public display and discussion. In reconsidering the international ‘identity’ show more generally, attention will be drawn towards the necessity of a renewed deconstructive attention not only to specific instances of cultural dominance, but also relationships between curatorial practices and their particular discursive contexts. Since the late 1980s questions of identity and social inequality have become a major international focus for public exhibitions of contemporary visual art. Beginning with the widely debated survey show Les Magiciens de la Terre, which was staged at the Centre Pompidou and the Parc de la Villette in Paris in 1989, exhibitions of this sort are now held regularly not only within western(ized) liberal-democratic but also politically authoritarian contexts worldwide.
Published in Journal of Curatorial Studies, ‘China: Curating, Exhibitions and Display Culture’ 4 (1) (Spring 2015), pp. 6–32.
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Notes
- 1.
Enwezor (2008, p. 224).
- 2.
Anderson (2006).
- 3.
Bauman (1991).
- 4.
For a discussion of these changes in outlook in relation to radical political thinking on the Left in France during the late 1960s and early 1970s, see Moi (1986, pp. 4–6).
- 5.
Attitudes associated with the politics of identity were first articulated during the early to mid-1960s by groups, such as the student Nonviolent coordinating committee, that emerged as part of the US civil rights movement (see Kauffman 1990). The term ‘identity politics’ was first used in a statement issued by the black feminist group the Combahee River collective in 1977 (see Eisenstein 1978).
- 6.
Foster (1985, p. 139).
- 7.
For a Marxist-influenced critique of this lack of priority, see Roberts (1994, pp. 1–36).
- 8.
For a comprehensive discussion of differing critical approaches towards social inequality as part of the politics of identity, see Hall (1990, pp. 222–237) and Baker (2011, pp. 215–245).
- 9.
Foucault (1999).
- 10.
Butler (2006).
- 11.
Spivak (1987).
- 12.
Gilroy (1993).
- 13.
Roberts, op cit., 18.
- 14.
Bishop (2005, pp. 116–127).
- 15.
For a critical overview of issues related to the conjunction of artistic production and the politics of identity, see Meecham and Sheldon (2005, pp. 237–264) and Wood et al. (1993).
- 16.
Taylor (2005, pp. 11–12).
- 17.
Hung and Wang (2010, pp. 368–378).
- 18.
See der Welt (1994) and Schmid (2012, pp. 283–297).
- 19.
Said (1978).
- 20.
Bhabha (1994).
- 21.
See, for example, Greenberg et al. (1996), Charlotte (2004), Vanderlinden and Filipovic (2005) and Obrist (2008).
- 22.
Enwezor, op cit., pp. 209, 232.
- 23.
ibid., p. 225.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 224.
- 25.
Ziff (1996).
- 26.
Clarke (2008, p. 274).
- 27.
Gao (2008, pp. 135–164).
- 28.
Smith et al. (2008).
- 29.
(Johnson) chang Tsong-Zung is the Hong Kong-based Director of the Hanart TZ Gallery and curator of the influential 1993 exhibition China’s New Art Post-1989. Gao shiming is Associate Professor of Art History and Head of the centre for Visual cultural Research at the china Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. Sarat Maharaj is the London-based academic and curator best known for his scholarly writings on Marcel Duchamp, Richard Hamilton and James Joyce as well as his role as a co-curator of Documenta XI in 2003.
- 30.
Maharaj et al. (2008).
- 31.
ibid., pp. 18–19.
- 32.
ibid., p. 2.
- 33.
ibid., p. 2.
- 34.
ibid., pp. 168–169.
- 35.
See Merewether (2006).
- 36.
GZ Triennial (2008).
- 37.
Gao (2008).
- 38.
ibid., pp. 36–37.
- 39.
ibid., pp. 37–38.
- 40.
ibid., p. 41.
- 41.
Catching (2012, pp. 231–249).
- 42.
Wu and Wang, op cit., pp. 276–277.
- 43.
Catching, op cit.
- 44.
Tibet was absorbed within the PRC as an autonomous region by force in 1951. It remains a contested space with local activists continuing to pursue independence through public protest and confrontation with the chinese state. The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region was established as part of the PRC in 1955, prior to which parts of the region had fallen under the nominal control of the soviet Union. The Uighur region is a historically contested space encompassing numerous ethnic groups and a majority adherence to Islam.
- 45.
As an invited speaker at the Forum in Motion staged as part of the closing of Farewell to Post-Colonialism in 2008, the present author signalled in advance a desire to discuss the PRC’s own present-day involvement in colonialism/imperialism. The session of the forum concerned was closed to the public and conducted in English (a common way of circumventing legal restrictions on public expression within the PRC). There was also no actual discussion of the topic concerned other than points made in a speech given by the present author.
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Gladston, P. (2016). International Curatorial Practice and the Problematic De-Territorialization of the ‘Identity’ Show. In: Deconstructing Contemporary Chinese Art. Chinese Contemporary Art Series. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46488-5_2
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