Call for Papers: The Exhibition Effect and Beyond (Footprint 39)

Feb 04, 2025 - Aug 01, 2025

Architectural exhibitions, despite their transient nature, have a profound influence in articulating movements, sparking central discussions and marking traces in the field. They act as active agents that represent, culminate, disseminate or project prevailing paradigms in architectural discourse at specific moments, as demonstrated by the 1927 Deutscher Werkbund architecture exhibition, the Strada Novissima at the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, and the 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MoMA. Moreover, like architectural competitions, they serve as contact zones (see Footprint, issue 26), fostering confrontation, negotiation and exchange among diverse actors in architecture – a field that is, by nature, multi-authorial.

While architectural exhibitions may serve promotional purposes, they are largely insulated from the market-driven stakes and commodification pressures that often influence art exhibitions, as their exhibitable objects rarely become collectible items. This relative autonomy has preserved their critical edge and has driven the rise of architectural exhibitions. Once a means for showcasing architectural work or scholarly expertise, architectural exhibitions have, in recent decades, evolved into an independent field of study with distinct procedures, methodologies, historiographies and effects. As a medium of its own, the exhibition both produces architecture as an exhibitable object and advances knowledge production, offering a lens to explore how research generates – rather than merely uncovers – its subjects. Today, these curatorial practices have converged, with architects and historians taking on the role of curators. Alongside the proliferation of biennials and research exhibitions, the rise of curatorial programmes within architecture departments across continents situates this historically radical force as a prominent agent of critical inquiry.

As a result, architectural exhibitions have gained further agency with a significant impact, producing what we refer to as the ‘exhibition effect’. This term, playing with the terminology of the ‘museum effect’, which elevates the perceived value and significance of objects simply by placing them in a museum context, and the ‘Bilbao effect’, which refers to the transformative impact of a landmark architectural project on a city’s economy, tourism and global image, refers to the current ubiquitous disciplinary and cultural impact of exhibitions.

Recent journal issues including Log no. 20 (2010), OASE no. 88 (2012), and Architectural Theory Review 23:1 (2019), discuss exhibition as a medium for architecture and knowledge production, an environment, a tool for representing and displaying architecture, and a collective spatial experience. Building on this growing body of contemporary literature, Footprint 39 aims to probe the ‘exhibition effect’ and the uncharted territories beyond with audacity. By re-evaluating definitions of the exhibition as an event, a common ground, an activist agency, a power tool for publicising and legitimising architecture, and a means of collecting and revealing archives, the issue seeks to critically address the status of institutions involved in collecting and displaying, the privilege of visibility essential for exhibiting, the comforts and discomforts associated with possessing or lacking recorded archives, and the dynamics of curatorial networks.

In this pivotal moment, as what was once considered the periphery shifts to the centre of global exhibitions – challenging and diversifying the previously dominant Euro-American model, as seen in prominent venues such as Venice and Sharjah – Footprint 39 invites contributors to explore the following questions: How can exhibitions occur beyond established systems, methods and institutions? What new materialities and methodologies do exhibitions inspire? In what ways can exhibitions become displays of discursivity to debate and adjust our worlds? How might unrecorded historical experiments be brought into the present? What new perspectives do exhibitions offer on unconventional archives? How can curatorship from the ‘periphery’ itself redefine the field? How can we utilise the unique agency of curatorial studies in architectural education? What new roles are emerging for curators in understudied territories and geographies toward a global discourse and inclusive scholarship? Finally, as exhibitions shift from being alternative to increasingly central – yet still arguably radical – practices, how might curatorial acts serve as a fulcrum to address contemporary crises and conflicts? Contributions from underrepresented scholars and researchers working on the thresholds of architectural history and theory and its allied disciplines are particularly welcome.

Authors of full articles (6000–8000 words including endnotes) can submit their contributions via Footprint’s online platform before 1 August 2025, with all submissions undergoing double-blind peer-review.

Review articles and visual essays (unpublished exhibition proposals are also welcome) (2000–4000 words including endnotes) will be selected by editors based on a 500-word summary emailed to the editors before 1 August 2025.

Authors should include a 100-word bio with their submissions and secure permission to use any images or copyrighted materials.

For more information, please consult Footprint’s Author Guidelines at: https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/footprint/about/submissions

Correspondence should be directed to editors Esin Kömez Dağlıoğlu and Esra Kahveci at editors.footprint@gmail.com.

Footprint 39 is scheduled for publication in the autumn of 2026.