Theater of Exhibitions

Description

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. The book also considers the current commodification of the art industry and the distribution of images in the digital age. Drawing from his formation in theater and his own curatorial work, Jens Hoffmann reflects on the spaces of contemporary art--the gallery, the institution, the biennial--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, while demanding new attitudes and new thinking. Hoffmann's theater posits the exhibition as an anthropological endeavor, and the curator as its agent.

Jens Hoffmann is a writer and exhibition maker based in New York, Milan, and San Jose, Costa Rica. He has curated more than one hundred exhibitions worldwide and written more than three hundred essays, articles, and reviews on art and exhibition making since the late 1990s. Hoffmann is currently Senior Curator at Despacio Center for Contemporary Art in San Jose .