What if an artwork changes its shape and sense with every encounter? Is there such a thing as multivoiced meaning, resulting from the interactions with an artwork? Using the concept of polyphony as a figure of speculation, this project assumes that multiple appropriations and reshapings occur in the encounter of art and that the reception proposed by artists and institutions is being subverted.
In the contemporary art world, not only artworks but also encounters with them have become mobile. They multiply in oral acts of negotiation and communication as well as through regional and local contexts. The research project investigates the changing, site-specific processes of the reception of globally circulating art. Do encounters and narratives take place in the exhibition space, which deviate from the readings offered by the institution (visitor texts, guided tours, etc.)? Can dissent be generated in the act of reception? In addition, what could a polyphony of negotiations look like?
The project comprises a series of larger and smaller case studies in which the interaction of different actors (installation personnel, mediation, exhibition visitors, etc.), their speech acts, and local infrastructures is examined. The research perspective transcends the dichotomy of production and reception by understanding exhibitions as a complex structure of transregional processes and as a common space of experience.
Encounters in Motion combines exhibition history and discourse analysis with ethnographic field research methods. It brings a fundamentally new perspective to exhibition research on the topic of traveling exhibitions. The project makes a substantial contribution to empirically grounded and transregional oriented research perspectives, which are urgently needed for art studies.