At the Mercy of the Booklet: A Review of Shapeshifters
Exhibitions often reveal their intentions in the first few seconds — in the lighting, the layout, the quiet cues left for the viewer. As I walked into the exhibition Shapeshifters: On Wounds, Wonders and Transformation at Framer Framed in Amsterdam, I knew the exhibition wanted to tell me something very important. I just didn’t know what.
The first series of work I saw was Georges Senga’s Money Make the World. It very much had a Dutch Golden Age aesthetic to it, which instantly left me hesitant. There was no text alongside to explain it. To curb the scepticism I could already feel lurking into my perception of the exhibition, I quickly walked over to the reception to find literature about the works.
The exhibition guide I found – a single exhibition copy loaned to me – revealed that the artist had made these in 2024 using archival images, descriptions of objects from museum collections, and AI. The objective was to create visuals of the undocumented presence of Dutch colonisation in Congo. But without this specific piece of knowledge, a dangerous thing had almost happened: the visual language alone had conveyed to me the same white person’s idea of slavery and colonisation that reading a history book with stone-cold facts does.
The next danger I had a close call with was when I spotted an intricate piece with print on banana leaves, suspended and intended to be viewed from below. I found the work to be beautiful. The booklet said it was called A Palimpsest for the Tongue, created by Nigerian-Canadian artist Kosisochukwu Nnebe. The artwork used chlorophyll printing to ‘draw focus to the history and migration of the banana plant and its revelations on Blackness and racial capitalism,’ the booklet told me.
But before flipping through the booklet to find this information, my only conclusion from this piece was just that it was beautiful. And when I imagine a white Dutch person — even a well-intentioned one — who has not been exposed to the historical significance of banana leaves in other cultures would view this, it makes me shudder. Looking at an artwork by an artist from an ethnic minority and simply admiring its beauty is unjust. I would even go so far as to say that it’s veering towards fetishisation.
What Would We Do Without the Booklet?
I talk of these two individual pieces of work instead of the exhibition as a whole because that’s how I viewed this experience: disjointed. The different artworks — even the ones I didn’t fully understand — stood strong but separate. The exhibition as a whole, however, had next to no impact on me. I can chalk this up to one of two possible reasons: either the exhibition had no cohesion at all, or it did have cohesion but the connections were communicated poorly. The fact that there was a booklet with in-depth information about the subjects of the exhibition is what makes me lean towards the second reason.
I could tell that immense, incredible thought had been put into creating this booklet. The introductory essays gave rich insights into Framer Framed as an institution as well as the theoretical beginnings of this exhibition. But if the exhibition could not stand on its own feet without this booklet, then perhaps the booklet as a publication should have been the primary work.
Of course, a simple solution would have been to put parts of the booklet’s texts alongside the artworks themselves. However, amidst constant discourse on best practices, I’m certain that leaving out these descriptions must have been a conscious decision and not an oversight. Perhaps the institution's guiding belief of subverting traditional museum practices, of which wall texts are one, led to this decision. And while I’m fully in support of subversion, this was not an exhibition where ‘the art could speak for itself’. Subjects like ownership, restitution and repair have long and complicated histories, and it becomes the institution’s responsibility to provide context of these to the common Dutch person.
Re-thinking Curatorial Subversion
What is the middle ground then, between overexplained wall texts and the complete opposite, which is no text? It is definitely not the act of carrying around the lone exhibition copy of the booklet. It is not having to buy the booklet. Nor is it reading from the free PDF version of it, where the audience is forced to look back and forth between the cold glow of their phone screen and the delicate artworks in front of them, which creates a chain of momentary disconnects.
I propose we expand our imaginations of curatorial subversion. What can replace wall texts while still driving a narrative that connects the artworks? Do we need to invest in technological aids such as audio guides to create these immersive experiences? And in the absence of funding, are there other, simpler curatorial and spatial decisions that can have similar effects?
If our curatorial risks don’t bring the audience closer to the work, then they aren’t risks at all, just absences. And that, more than anything, should guide where we go from here.
