Exhibition, 2008

Sean Snyder’s video works and installations are instruments of analysis, which he uses to investigate globally circulating images as tools of political propaganda and to produce and preserve knowledge contexts. Taking as his point of departure a Soviet “documentary” of 1965, which was screened under the title Noble Impulses of Soul (director: Israel Goldstein), in his video work Exhibition Snyder looks into how great a part ideology plays in exhibitions as educational institutions. The artist reedited the original video about the organization of an exhibition of contemporary Mexican art in a Ukrainian museum, including the communication methods employed: guided tours, opening speeches, art history seminar. He rearranged the chronology, and the voice-over is now only partially heard, complemented by intertitles that repeat part of what is said.
The result of this rearrangement is a film, which lays bare the ideological structure of the original film, thus demonstrating the impossibility of delivering on its promise of documentary objectivity. At the same time Exhibition is a work that through systematic pauses in the telling of its story makes it clear that any and every museum order is an expression of an ideological substrate; it may mask itself as universally valid, but inevitably remains the expression of a history of art with only limited validity. (KB)