Unrealised Exhibitions
Unrealised Exhibitions is a section of the MoRE Museum dedicated to exhibitions that have never been realised. Like unrealised artworks, these projects, which were never staged, allow us to look at the history of art of the 20th and 21st centuries from a different perspective.
There are many reasons why these projects remained unrealised, and many stories to be told about them. Consider, for example, some of the most famous unrealised exhibitions of the 20th century: the E42, which was never completed but nevertheless became the starting point for the development of an entire new district in Rome; Hans Haacke's exhibition Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, censored at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1971, which led to the dismissal of curator Edward Fry; or the exhibition La Mamma, conceived by Harald Szeemann in the mid-1970s.
Institutional archives are a privileged source for this research, but artists and curators are our fundamental interlocutors.
MoRE has already addressed this theme in various ways, for example with the essay by Anna Zinelli, Pornographie. La sezione non realizzata alla documenta 5 di Kassel, but it was also tangentially present inside the story of several projects stored inside our archive, designed for specific exhibitions, that turned differently than was originally planned - for example Tiramolla 1992 proposed by Liliana Moro for documenta 9 in Kassel, 1992 - or that have simply never been realised, such as the Cannocchiale ottico percorribile, originally designed by Paolo Scheggi for the exhibition Nuovo paesaggio, commissioned by the 1968 Milan Triennale. Finally inside the digital archive we can also find unrealised artworks that are exhibitions themselves, like Cesare Pietroiusti Projects for a retrospective exhibition.
This series of monographic studies focus on specific cases: exhibitions that could have taken place but were never opened to the public.
Unrealised Exhibitions