A Living Catalogue for Anish Kapoor: Revealing Untold Stories in Rich Media Museum

Symposium:


Session Title:
  • Curating and Collecting the New: Resistance is Futile

Presentation Title:
  • A Living Catalogue for Anish Kapoor: Revealing Untold Stories in Rich Media Museum

Presenter(s):


Venue(s):


Abstract:

  • Panel: Curating and Collecting the New: Resistance is Futile

    Every art exhibition is rich with the untold stories. Digital platforms offer new opportunities for us to see behind the scenes and to hear the voices of the audience in museum publications. The Living Catalogue is an experimental initiative by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia that explores the possibilities of rich media publication to discover new ways of engaging audiences. The first Living Catalogue was produced for 2012/13 for the exhibition Anish Kapoor – the first major solo showing of Kapoor’s work in Australia. The exhibition offered an ideal context for this experiment as the visceral perceptual effect of Kapoor’s work on the audience poses a challenge for any traditional publication about his art. The Living Catalogue for Anish Kapoor exploited the relational dynamics of networked reading, in which the downloading of a publication establishes a channel of communication between the museum and the reader (who is now also a watcher, listener and, potentially, speaker). The living catalogue appeared as a series of iterations throughout and beyond the duration of the exhibition. Each iteration included fresh content that responded to and included the reactions of the audience to the exhibition and the experiences of the staff who realised the show. Firsthand accounts of people’s experiences of the exhibition (including experts as well as members of the general public) were recorded and integrated into the final iteration of the catalogue, adding the audience’s voice to the in depth documentation and critical contextualisation of the exhibition.
    Co-authored with Lizzie Muller

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