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Exhibitionism: Gregory Elgstrand looks at the concept of the "learning exhibition".

Article Excerpt
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Shortly after I joined YYZ in 2.004, I came across an old e-mail addressed to my predecessor. The correspondence was from Marc Neissen, co-director and co-curator of De Overslag, an artist-run centre in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The message was direct. De Overslag was interested in working with YYZ on the co-production of an exhibition, I_wanna_see_YOU_[Y.Y.Z.ca_DE_overslag.nl].

I became fixated, rather fashionably, on the idea of facilitating a self-organizing exhibition that would proceed without a definitive plan or expectation of prescribed outcomes. I was also intrigued by the possibility of unhinging the exhibition from curatorial (read institutional) directives and providing participating artists with a basic infrastructure and some resources: a scenario, not a plan.

The basic structure for the project was three interdependent manifestations: an exhibition at YYZ in Toronto in May and June of 2008, an exhibition at De Overslag in Eindhoven in October 2008 and a publication to follow a short time after. The further elaboration of the idea was the decision to not foist collaboration on the artists invited to participate but to leave this option open as just one possibility among others. (1)

I was particularly pleased with the manifestation of the project at YYZ. Although I did not participate in the De Overslag incarnation, reports suggest it was a successful continuation of the project. In Toronto, I_wanna_see_YOU ... started with a series of conversations between the artists about how the exhibition could come together. One of the questions we faced was how to construct an exhibition that would extend over two venues over seven months? What would the second manifestation learn, if anything, from the first? Without creating a prototype of an end state, the artists were invited to proceed. Through the course of its development I came to speculate about how the show might be structured as a "learning system" (to borrow a term from Hans-Ulrich Obrist), and started to ask the question: Can you teach an exhibition new tricks?

In the model of British architect Cedric Price and British theatre director Joan Littlewood's Fun Palace, I found a model for what I call a learning exhibition. In a text written by Littlewood and Price in 1968, the architect and director explain that Fun Palace was...