Superseding the Global: Planetary Perspectives in Contemporary Exhibition Making
Regine Ehleiter – 2026
Regine Ehleiter's opening essay traces the trajectory of planetarity within contemporary art discourse, showing how the term has been adopted as a curatorial keyword while often losing conceptual precision in the process. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, she distinguishes planetarity from both globalization and the Anthro-pocene, emphasizing its potential to reframe environmental debates beyond human-centered logic. She highlights the 2020 Taipei Biennial You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet, curated by Bruno Latour and colleagues, as a case where "planetary" rhetoric was materialized into a staging of conflicting ecological and geopolitical worldviews. Her essay demonstrates that although planetarity is often reduced to a catchword, the contemporary art exhibition may prove to be a form uniquely capable of modeling the complexities of planetary thinking and surpassing the inveterate confines of globalist reasoning.
How to cite: Regine Ehleiter. "Superseding the Global: Planetary Perspectives in Contemporary Exhibition Making." In Exhibition Ecologies: Entanglements of Art, Institutions, and Politics in the Environmental Crisis, edited by Friederike Schäfer and Regine Ehleiter, 25–42. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783689240479-002.
