What we know is that nothing is closed, not even history. The discipline of history is often asked to tie neat and even bows on the way the temporal, spatial, political, cultural and economic spheres come into contact with one another. This is true of art history as well. Now consider exhibitions. Contrary to what the discipline of (art) history may wish us to accept, exhibitions are not simply documents of a plotted-out thesis, made up of sets of actions taken by artist, curator, technician, registrar (the institution). They are live. They are events, and they are also provisional. As in, they describe one set of interdependencies that may present an argument, and, if we are lucky, a wild thread that interrupts that argument is in the ring too.

In 1996, as seniors at high school, we were regularly asked to write exhibition reviews for art history class. Cultural Safety: Contemporary Art from New Zealand sits firmly in my mind as my first experience encountering an exhibition that was a provisional answer to large questions: What is culture here, now (then)? Can this be translated outside of itself? In what is (material) culture constituted, and which values are drawn upon to shape our world(s)? Curated by Gregory Burke together with Peter Weiermair, then Director of Frankfurter Kunstverein, this exhibition was first held in German venues—Frankfurt, then Aachen—followed by multiple outings in Aotearoa. It presented work by artists who would shape a generation, as well as continuing to explode open discourses on appropriation, forging bicultural lexicographies, and tensions around colonialism and internationalism.

These conversations were already in flight off the back of the seminal exhibition Headlands (1992). I wish I had my notebooks from the multiple trips I made as a sixth former. I wish I had the essay I wrote. While it’s likely I drew heavily on the writing produced for the show, I wonder if I caught the ambivalence, the ambition, the spreading wide into a self-defined horizon? All of which seem essential to what powered the exhibition and the artists at the time. Even the relationship with a key sponsor, Air New Zealand, was up for grabs as a site for this ambivalence.

This exhibition is one I return to, as it marks the fundamental importance of exhibition making to art history, exactly because it openly welcomes the ambivalent, the conflictual. This exhibition is one I return to for the exactitude, and risk, involved in thinking new forms with, towards, but also against, standards. It expresses the full-bodied friction that exhibitions can hold within them: violence, humour, beauty, joy, productive doubt. I wonder what an iteration of this would look like today, and what kind of sense it could make?