PLANNING
This exhibition you are planning may be a solo exhibition of your own work, or you might have been put in charge of organising a group exhibition. Either way, you’ll have to decide what works to put in the exhibition and where by curating. Curating not only includes where the works are going to be displayed, but also your concept for the exhibition.
If this is an exhibition of your own work, you will be exploring a topic or question through your art, and this may form the concept of your exhibition. If it is a group exhibition, you might all be making art about a similar theme or using the same materials. Once you have your concept, then you can start thinking about planning the exhibition.
You will need to find out from your venue what restrictions there are. Maybe you’re working in an old building and you can’t drill into the walls, or you’re in a space that doesn’t have a lift to take works between floors. Find out what you can’t do in your venue to help you decide what you can exhibit.
If your venue is run by someone, ask if they have floor plans, or if they don’t have one, can you go into the venue and measure up to create your own? A floor plan helps you to visualise the space and can be a tool for deciding where to place your selected works.
One crucial thing to find out are the sizes of the doors at the venue to check your work will actually get inside!
TECHNICAL NEEDS
Next, you need to get the measurements and technical needs of the artwork you want to exhibit. You will want to ask them if the work requires power, special fixings, or if the works are heavy to move.
Get images of all the works too so you can familiarise yourself with what they look like. If you’re working with multiple artists, make sure you do this as far in advance as possible, so you get all the information to you on time (don’t be afraid to send a follow-up message if you've not heard back from your artists!).
IDENTIFYING COMPLEX WORKS
Once you have all of the artwork information, you can identify which works are the complex works. For example, if the work is 4D, they will need a plug socket so these works are limited to where those sockets are located in the venue. Or if you have a large painting, but two walls are not tall enough, you can narrow down where that work can be hung.
Go through all of these and start to place these on your floor plan. This could be as simple as adding notes of artists names onto a photocopy of the floor plans or making a 3D floor plan using software, you can easily move works around if you change your mind and not waste paper in the process.
AESTHETICS
Now that those are in place, and you are left with the more flexible work you can now think more about the aesthetics of the exhibition. You need to look at the colour, themes and mediums of the works and decide if you are grouping works with similarities or are you spreading them throughout the exhibition.
It might be hard to try and plan your exhibition when you’re looking at images of works on a screen and not in real life but having a plan going into your installation days will save you a lot of time, but also don’t put pressure on yourself to get your layout 100% perfect on paper.
Once you’re in the venue with the artwork, two works you put together might look horrible next to each other, or you put a plug socket on your floor plan in the wrong place so now you must move works around. Things will change so don’t panic!