With a shared commitment to discursive programming on current debates in contemporary art, Blackwood Gallery and Gallery TPW are pleased to partner with Justina M. Barnicke Gallery to think out loud about curatorial experimentation on the occasion of Charles Stankievech’s curatorial debut in Toronto.

Intelligence is Knowledge with a Shelf Life is a participatory workshop on curatorial methodologies and the contemporary role of the exhibition. In dialogue with his exhibition project CounterIntelligence at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Stankievech will lead a discussion on recent developments in the field of archival exhibitions, cultures of display and the entanglement of art and theory. The workshop will explore the conditions—disciplinary, institutional, and political—under which new methodologies might emerge.

Can the contemporary role of the exhibition escape the “no man’s land between the didactic museum and the conceptual gesture”? How can we engage with art and artefact on the same level without flattening everything as information? Can an archival exhibition avoid the reduction of content to an indexical function and instead be configured as a manifestation capable of generating an affective, immersive experience? What kinds of structures can allow us to imagine different forms of engagement?

F. M. Begoum (CIA), "Observations on the Double Agent" in Studies in Intelligence Journal, 1962
Paul Virilio, "The Monolith" in Bunker Archeology, 1975
Celine Conderelli, Support Structures (excerpt), 2009
Boris Groys, Google: Grammar Without Words, 2012

Eyal Weizman, "Walking Through Walls" Ch.7 in Hollow Land, 2007
Alexander Galloway, "Edges" in The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, 2007