The book’s contributions explore how exhibitions can be read and understood across different social and cultural contexts, highlighting differences within the region, whilst also inviting new approaches and methodologies to pin-point areas for comparative forms of research.

Exhibitions are tightly intertwined with the processes of historiography, creating dynamic and plural relations between and beyond all participants, both human and non-human. Thus they are able to connect different histories while writing history themselves, their reciprocal relationships making them a complex object of and transforming agent in historical research.

Theater of Exhibitions analyzes “art after the end of art,” questioning whether inherited frameworks of making, theorizing, and exhibiting art still apply to contemporary practice. Drawing from his formation in theater and his own curatorial work, Hoffmann reflects on the spaces of contemporary art and ultimately positions the discipline of curating in the context of a larger cultural sphere shaped by the political, social, and economic conditions of its time.

Focusing on time instead of the typically predominant category of space, this publication—the second volume in the Cultures of the Curatorial series—takes up the key aesthetic, social, political, and economic issues of the early twenty-first century running through the field and framed by the axes of exhibiting and the temporal.

This publication explores themes of the exhibition through its terms—not, however, to confine into isolated conceptual categories, but to interconnect. These terms characterize exhibiting, and emphasize a “between-ness.” Examining a term lays bare its ruptures, shifts, or recreations, as well as social, societal, and cultural changes that have the power to structure through historical conjecture.