Contribution to publication “Exhibiting in an Educational Field”

Institution as a Way of Life researcher Lucie Kolb contributed an essay to the publication Exhibiting in an Educational Field – LiveInYourHead 2009-2019 on ten years of activities of LiveInYourHead, Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD)’s exhibition space. The book explores the relationships between art education and curatorial knowledge and analyzes the movements, the dynamics and the networks that connect art schools, exhibition spaces, research institutes and knowledge production centers.

Lucie Kolb’s essay centers on Longtang, an artspace in Zurich-Seebach that reflects critically moments of self-institutionalization, the instrumentalization of art as a think tank, respectively ‘art in the service of’. Longtang calls itself “a tank to think through contemporary art” alluding to the model of the “think tank”. It’s located in a pavilion that recalls a temporary school and aims not only at bringing forth activities such as exhibiting, teaching or producing art, but also plays with forms of life that make such activities possible. The essay discusses Longtang as a model for research in the art field that does not please itself in an imagined independency from contemporary art, or research within the art field that does not want a room of its own, but occupies the space in between.