*CFP* "EXHIBITION DESIGN INFLUENCED BY CINEMA", ISSUE FIVE CMA JOURNAL

It's all in the movies:

The medium of cinema works through an unfolding process of perception. As a spectator of cinema, one is drawn into a dimensional world, where the experience of spectacle, narrative, and semiosis work together to percolate a film’s interest, context, and purpose. Cinema is affective, engaging, and critically contemplative. Through dynamic relations between the movement and colour of images, ambient, immersive, and musical sound, cultural and human perspective, cinema creates an altered experience of reality. This encourages individuals to reflect, through embodied and cognitive instances, on the fluctuating conditions of the world and human experience. 

Cinema, since its invention, has given visibility to endless objects, circumstances, and concepts including those that may have once remained unseen, unspoken, or unthought. Cinema shapes the human perception of time and space, therefore creating attitudes about history and the future. Consequently, it is a medium that allows for ideas to unfold in an engaging and ruminative way. 

Like cinema, art objects produce affect and contemplation in audiences through aesthetics, context, and meaning. Increasing examples of contemporary visual art exhibitions include moving-image. Despite cinematic influence across various art forms, the practice of visual art curation remains linked to traditional theoretical practices. A common exhibition design which is derived from historical and modernist eras is seen utilized by numerous contemporary art institutions today. It is a design that uses neutral space, places artworks singularly among this space, and presents knowledge about the artworks through text and dialogue. Moving-images in white-walled galleries take the shape of objects, replacing or accompanying more traditional media, such as painting, sculpture, and photography, causing moving-image to lose some of its immersive power. Above all, the design asks viewers to perform a laborious task– requiring exhibitions and artworks to be read as if they were essays, provoking the exhibition experience to be informative and functional, rather than emotive and experiential. This sort of encounter with exhibitions has been historically productive but by thinking through a medium that works towards and succeeds at affecting plural audiences, exhibitions and art practice can communicate with viewers through feeling prior to dialogue. Ultimately, this allows for more perspectives, meanings, and possibilities to manifest in the rhetoric and projects of the art-world.  

This special edition mini-issue of the CMA Journal invites writers, reviewers, practitioners, and scholars from the fields of visual art, film, media history, as well as critical and cultural studies to contemplate how the perceptual process of cinema or other media can inform an altered form of curation in contemporary white-cube gallery space. 

Subjects may explore but are not limited to the following questions:

• How can typical exhibition design be rethought to include aesthetic and theoretical elements that work to unfold encounters with art that are both affective and contemplative of artistic context? 
• What are the ways that curatorial practice can exercise efforts to perceptually draw spectators into contemplation of art through means other than text-based context? 
• How is the common exhibition design limiting for diverse public audiences? Does this common exhibition and white cube design sustain a certain perception of art? 
• In what ways does the structure and business of the art world make it more challenging to proceed with new types of curatorial exercise within contemporary exhibition space? 
• How can exhibition design better reflect the complexity of contemporary practices that are often intermedial and multifarious? 
• How can affect, embodiment, and sensation lead to a stronger creation of knowledge?

We invite contributions including:

1. Scholarly Papers addressing curatorial research in relation to embodiment, immersivity, and contemporary media 
2. Curatorial Projects 
3. Exhibition Reviews and Critiques 
4. Book Reviews 
5. Exhibition Descriptions

Submission Process:

Submissions should be no less than 500 words and no more than 5000 words. All submissions should follow a Chicago Style in-text format. 

Submissions are welcomed until October 20th 12:00 am PDT. Projects submitted after this time will not be considered for review. 

Please refer to the CMA Journal submission guidelines.

Submissions to this mini-issue do not need to be filled via the online form. 

Projects should be submitted via email directly to cma_journal@sfu.ca Subject ATTN: Mini Issue #1

Ivakhiv, Adrian. “Ecology, Morphology, Semiosis.” Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013, 34-67. Project Muse.