Materials and dimensions variable
Duration: forever
Courtesy the artist and Kunsthal Gent
Video and editing: Bieke Criel
Endless Exhibition is a curatorial-manifesto-as-artwork by Prem Krishnamurthy. Building on his long work as a designer, writer, exhibition maker, and founder of P!—the ‘Mom-and-Pop-Kunsthalle’ that first existed in New York City from 2012–2017—the artwork surveys the overproduction, mass consumption, and fleeting attention span of the contemporary art world. To redefine the stakes of exhibition making, Endless Exhibition proposes a simple temporal play: starting today, every exhibition, art fair, and biennial mounted should be permanent, remaining on view forever.
A performative, polymorphic work—incarnated in texts, images, PDF presentations, lectures, publications, audio and video documentation, contractual agreements, and even whole exhibition programs and institutional formats—Endless Exhibition poses timely questions of space, waste, labor, and future histories. At the same time, it challenges the supposed autonomy of discrete artworks, fulfilling, in Krishnamurthy’s own words from a 1999 notebook entry, “[Principle] 5: reappearance of the project—the project should never be ‘done’—it should always invite addition, rethinking, recontextualizing…”
In 2019, Kunsthal Gent acquired the piece as part of its inaugural institutional framework, "Kunsthal as City". In this context, it accrues layers of architecture and programming to construct an ongoing archaeology. Instantiating itself over time, Endless Exhibition rehearses new approaches to changing the global art ecosystem by rewriting its basic rules.