When I go to exhibition spaces, such as galleries, museums, or experience artworks in the public space I often think about how an artist has placed a work in a particular way. I also think about why a curator has positioned the works in a certain spot or sequence? I think about the visions and methods behind the placement. What are the thoughts behind the works and the space they are located in? I think about how the placement influenced me as a viewer? How could a work potentially have been placed differently? Sometimes when I am at an exhibition, I think to myself, what would I have done, how would I have placed these works in this space? Could I have pushed the concept and theme further by placing and arranging the works differently? From time to time when I am at an exhibition I even imagine and re-compose works in different ways in my head. Did You ever think about doing that – using your imagination to reshape, re-curate an exhibition?

Setting the tone is a phrase rooted in music, suggesting the opening notes of a composition – it refers to how the first lines in a song or an atmosphere in a piece of music evokes emotions. It could also relate to how an opening scene in film generates curiosity, producing cliffhanger narratives. Or how the mood and ambience of a space can be strengthened with enhanced work and exhibition displays.

Setting the Tone of the Exhibition (prologue body) at Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, brings together works by nine international artists, explores how minimal artistic gestures – like sound, sculpture, and performance – can shape, theme, and form an exhibition. It examines how works can be placed and positioned to orchestrate, guide, and influence the way the audience walks through an exhibition, hence how they experience the works. The exhibition is connected to the overall theme and project Setting the Tone of the Exhibition – The Anatomy of Exhibition Openings that researches the methodology of exhibition making. Setting the Tone of the Exhibition looks at how curators and artists address the complexities of shaping an exhibition, focusing on where it truly begins—not just with the opening, but in the curatorial decisions made beforehand. Through titles, graphic design, Social Media, locations, spatial narratives, artworks, books, performances, and seminars, curators set the tone for the viewer’s first encounter with the exhibition.

Artists, curators, and exhibition makers have an incredible number of things to consider when it comes down to the production of an exhibition. Often this involves small subtle curatorial decisions and invisible things that only a trained professional eye will notice. There are usually high expectations of what exhibitions are, their theme and artists, what exhibitions consist of, how they appear, which artists are invited, how they mediate and present work to the viewer. From titles to leaflets, from invitations to talks, from labels to lights, from seminars to screenings the viewer wants to be astonished yet guided, surprised yet educated. Altogether, these elements are part of an exhibition maker’s task, and even the smallest things—elements that visitors may take for granted—contribute to the mood, the dramaturgy, and in setting the tone of the exhibition.