Identify your limitations, acknowledge the periphery

Boundaries, encasement, and entrapment – how does the vitrine mediate the subject or the object? Available for viewing, yet significantly distanced from its spectator the vitrine is often questioned within museums and institutions. By acknowledging the vitrine’s confinements how might one adopt these elements to both activate an artwork and abolish boundaries? 
 
VITRINE, London is delighted to present an ambitious group exhibition with site-specific works by 18 British and International artists that will look at the notions of limitations, instruction-based practice, and the role of the vitrine within exhibition making. This exhibition will naturally manifest forms of the wunderkammer.

Engaging with the architecture of the space (a 16-metre vitrine enclosed behind glass), artworks have been created in an attempt to push the boundaries of the space in unexpected arrangements commenting on institutional display and ideas of artistic production.

Instructions and limitations act as a catalyst for this ambitious exhibition, for which artists have been invited by co-curators Alys Williams and Chris Bayley to devise a site-specific artwork that inhabits the restrictions and potential of the gallery space. Accepting chance in the realisation of an artwork, the exhibition looks at the ties among artists, artworks, the exhibition and its curators.

The project was first initiated via an email instructing artists to produce a site-specific artwork that inhabits the limitations of the gallery space with one ‘rule’: Works must be restricted to sit within the vitrine, utilising any elements of the space you wish, be it the floor, the ceiling, the lighting, the walls or the windows… The exhibition explicitly employs notions of chance and its outcomes are determined by a procedure that cannot be predicted, pushing the vitrine to its limits.