Where the Present Begins to Appear as Past: Mediating Contemporaneity in a Museum of the Future

In this practice-based PhD project, I explore how the concept of the contemporary can gain critical significance for the aesthetic practices that invoke it, specifically curating of contemporary art and dramaturgy in contemporary theatre. The exploration is conducted through the realization of the cross-aesthetic art exhibition and theatre performance Museum for fremtiden (2022), which I initiated and participated in in the intermediary position of curator and dramaturg as part of my research project. Museum for fremtiden was a collaboration between the contemporary theatre Sort/Hvid (Black/White) in Copenhagen and the contemporary art institution Kunsthal Aarhus in Aarhus. To develop a format transgressing the media of art exhibition and theatre performance under the collaboration’s paradoxical title, I gathered visual artists and theatre-makers invested in questions of time and temporality in their practices. The dissertation frames Museum for fremtiden’s mediation of exhibition and performance as a bringing together of conflictual forms of temporalization. This mediation, I argue, points to a fundamental ambiguity in the exhibition of art and the staging of theatre as either representational or enactive. The dissertation proposes a dialectical and self-contradictory contemporaneity between them in dialogue with theoretical debates in aesthetic theory, literary studies, critical museology, dramaturgy, and curatorial studies. Methodically, the PhD project builds on recent approximations between dramaturgy and curating as well as the emergence of practice-based research in the art institution. The advancement of curating as a research practice originates in the museum and has recently migrated to contemporary art institutions such as the kunsthalle and the practice of curating contemporary art. Here, curating is framed and debated as a research field under the meta-category of “the curatorial,” positioning exhibition-making in an expanded sense as a means of investigating research questions and enacting research propositions, often emphasizing the performative quality of the exhibition space. The dissertation interrogates such notions in the context of contemporary theatre and dramaturgical practice, constituting one of the research project’s sub-inquiries, as the theatre institution is not currently acknowledged as a host institution for practice-based research like contemporary art institutions are. In that regard, I compare curating to an understanding of dramaturgy as a “thinking through practice” in the context and conditions of the theatre institution, demonstrated through the process of making Museum for fremtiden. In the dissertation, meanwhile, this thinking through practice is directed toward the con-temporary as a critical concept, attempting to approach ways in which contemporaneity can be mediated in and through the bringing together of dramaturgical and curatorial practice. In that regard, I explore––on a more speculative level––the conditions of an aesthetics that momentarily can make the present appear as past in a historical present characterized by contemporaneity. In the dissertation, I connect such an aesthetics to Sort/Hvid under the artistic direction of Christian Lollike, pursuing the explication of a poetics of historicizing the present. As such, the research project gives occasion to a reflection on the relation between the process of making Museum for fremtiden and the idea of contemporaneity as a characterizing term for the historical present from the point of view of the implicated curator and dramaturg. I unfold this reflection in the five parts comprising the dissertation and the appendix: (1) an introduction situating the research project’s cross-institutional, intermedial, interdisciplinary, and conceptual framework; (2) a theoretical and methodological reflection, exploring different critical conceptualizations of the contemporary; (3) a journal article, investigating the potentials of curatorial research in the contemporary theatre institution; (4) a dramaturgical-curatorial analysis of the process of making and the twin iterations of Museum for fremtiden; and (5) a journal article, speculating on a method of “museum-ing,” building on dramatization. Finally, the dissertation documents the research project’s practical component of Museum for fremtiden in an appendix, comprising links to video and sound recordings, photographs from both iterations of the exhibition/performance, handouts on each artistic practice, and the exhibition catalogue, published by the press Antipyrine. Moreover, the appendix includes an English translation of my introduction to Christian Lollike’s plays in the book Underværket (The Wonder, 2022).