PC1:GS |
Group Shows |
An Introduction
“To live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your best not to bump yourself.” Georges Perec, Species of Spaces
PlanChest is a curatorial sketchbook with drawers. A place for storing, reflecting, and returning - not to file away exhibitions, but to unfold them.
Each drawer opens a different spatial proposition, initiated as an imagined exhibition each drawer becomes a curatorial rehearsal A speculative, partial, and precise blueprint for a future exhibition curated by Charlie Levine.
The exhibitions housed within these drawers, titled Chairs, Corridors, Corners, Curtains, are not conventional. They ask how space shapes interpretation, how cultural infrastructure becomes narrative, and how curating can be both site-specific and speculative all at once. Each drawer functions like an annotated footnote, an idea before the idea, a prelude to a show that may never exist, or notes in the margin of ones that already have, in fragments.
A room. A structure. A corner. A cue.
PlanChest 1 begins with what’s often overlooked: seating, thresholds, in-betweens, margins. These elements are not neutral. As Susan Hiller wrote, “The artist’s job is to point out what’s ignored.” These drawers reclaim curatorial attention as an act of care, focusing on what surrounds and supports, not just what is shown. They are homages to the exhibition site itself.
Theorist and archivist, Walter Benjamin, reminds us that architecture is absorbed not by concentrated scrutiny but through “habitual distraction.” These exhibitions turn that distracted glance into curatorial proposition. They reframe passage, pause, and proximity as methodologies. They ask us to look deeper into our everyday use and acknowledgement of the spaces we inhabit as well as the ones artworks do.
The imagined exhibitions draw on real-world practice, lived experience, and artistic lineage but fumbles the timeline. A planchest suggests something is archival, a record of what has been, whereas this project imagines what could be, the research before and the dream of the possible. Take Brian O’Doherty and his idea that inserting "art into gallery or case puts the art in "quotation marks." By making art an artificiality within the artificial, it suggests that gallery art is a trinket, a product of the boutique", as taken from his seminal text, Inside the White Cube. PlanChest is the trinket within which to house an artificial exhibition. O'Doherty continues: "Projects - short-term art made for specific sites and occasions - raise the issue of how the impermanent survives, if it does. Documents and photographs challenge the historical imagination by presenting to it an art that is already dead. The historical process is both hampered and facilitated by removing the original, which becomes increasingly fictitious as its afterlives become more concrete. What is preserved and what is allowed to lapse edit the idea of history - the form of communal memory [favoured] at any particular time. Undocumented projects may survive as [rumour] and attach themselves to the persona of their originator, who is constrained to develop a convincing myth."
PlanChest is a myth, the surviving object of an imagined idea, of a curatorial methodology and a keeper of ideas and research. Another example is Harald Szeemann’s Agency of Intellectual Guest Labour, that saw curating as hosting thought - a form of conceptual hospitality.
PlanChest emerged alongside the Institute of Curiosity & Curating, a pedagogical project grounded in openness, research, and experimentation. Both platforms honour curating not as mastery, but as a way of learning in public. A way of asking: What else could an exhibition be? How can we curate without space?
PlanChest 1 is not a linear story. It is an open cabinet.
Not for answers, but for propositions.
Seen drawer by drawer.
PlanChest is a curatorial sketchbook with drawers. A place for storing, reflecting, and returning - not to file away exhibitions, but to unfold them.
Each drawer opens a different spatial proposition, initiated as an imagined exhibition each drawer becomes a curatorial rehearsal A speculative, partial, and precise blueprint for a future exhibition curated by Charlie Levine.
The exhibitions housed within these drawers, titled Chairs, Corridors, Corners, Curtains, are not conventional. They ask how space shapes interpretation, how cultural infrastructure becomes narrative, and how curating can be both site-specific and speculative all at once. Each drawer functions like an annotated footnote, an idea before the idea, a prelude to a show that may never exist, or notes in the margin of ones that already have, in fragments.
A room. A structure. A corner. A cue.
PlanChest 1 begins with what’s often overlooked: seating, thresholds, in-betweens, margins. These elements are not neutral. As Susan Hiller wrote, “The artist’s job is to point out what’s ignored.” These drawers reclaim curatorial attention as an act of care, focusing on what surrounds and supports, not just what is shown. They are homages to the exhibition site itself.
Theorist and archivist, Walter Benjamin, reminds us that architecture is absorbed not by concentrated scrutiny but through “habitual distraction.” These exhibitions turn that distracted glance into curatorial proposition. They reframe passage, pause, and proximity as methodologies. They ask us to look deeper into our everyday use and acknowledgement of the spaces we inhabit as well as the ones artworks do.
The imagined exhibitions draw on real-world practice, lived experience, and artistic lineage but fumbles the timeline. A planchest suggests something is archival, a record of what has been, whereas this project imagines what could be, the research before and the dream of the possible. Take Brian O’Doherty and his idea that inserting "art into gallery or case puts the art in "quotation marks." By making art an artificiality within the artificial, it suggests that gallery art is a trinket, a product of the boutique", as taken from his seminal text, Inside the White Cube. PlanChest is the trinket within which to house an artificial exhibition. O'Doherty continues: "Projects - short-term art made for specific sites and occasions - raise the issue of how the impermanent survives, if it does. Documents and photographs challenge the historical imagination by presenting to it an art that is already dead. The historical process is both hampered and facilitated by removing the original, which becomes increasingly fictitious as its afterlives become more concrete. What is preserved and what is allowed to lapse edit the idea of history - the form of communal memory [favoured] at any particular time. Undocumented projects may survive as [rumour] and attach themselves to the persona of their originator, who is constrained to develop a convincing myth."
PlanChest is a myth, the surviving object of an imagined idea, of a curatorial methodology and a keeper of ideas and research. Another example is Harald Szeemann’s Agency of Intellectual Guest Labour, that saw curating as hosting thought - a form of conceptual hospitality.
PlanChest emerged alongside the Institute of Curiosity & Curating, a pedagogical project grounded in openness, research, and experimentation. Both platforms honour curating not as mastery, but as a way of learning in public. A way of asking: What else could an exhibition be? How can we curate without space?
PlanChest 1 is not a linear story. It is an open cabinet.
Not for answers, but for propositions.
Seen drawer by drawer.
