Project Dictionary of the Caucasus: From Ethnography to Conceptualist Exhibition

Main Article Content

Olga Sosnina

Abstract

In 2012, a major exhibition entitled Dictionary of the Caucasus: The Land and the People took place at the Tsaritsyno Museum. It brought together exhibits from 17 state cultural institutions and modern art workshops of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Makhachkala. An illustrated catalog was published, featuring 26 authorsforeign and Russian anthropologists, archaeologists, philologists, and art critics. In this article, the museum’s curator reflects on the linkages between ambitious scientific concepts and the reality of exhibition practice in the space of a modern Russian museum. The article is based on the experience of a single exhibition. It examines the development of a conceptual exhibition on a quite traditional empirical basis. The author addresses some key problems of conceptualism, an art movement that has already become part of the history of the twentieth century. It is connected, associatively and programmatically, to ethnographic conceptualisma new scientific discourse. The article poses the following questions: What are the mechanisms of translation of the author’s intention (concept) into the real exhibition space of an interdisciplinary project? What are the practices of imagination we would like to draw the spectator’s attention to? And, most importantly, what are the relations between this result and the approaches of ethnographic conceptualism, promoted by the authors of this volume? In Russian, extended summary in English.

Keywords

Exhibition-Dictionary, Text, Translation, Ethnographic Conceptualism, Contemporary Art, Interdisciplinarity, Exhibition Practice


Abstract 197 | PDF FULL PAPER (Русский) Downloads 120 PDF EXTENDED SUMMARY Downloads 78 HTML FULL PAPER (Русский) Downloads 47 HTML EXTENDED SUMMARY Downloads 27

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  • Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  • Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).