Displaying the Present

Preservation, Curation, and Exhibition-Making

This essay examines the museum as a site in which a provisional awareness of the present is constructed through acts of display. Drawing on my own practice as an architect, exhibition designer, and architectural curator, the text explores the conceptual and methodological proximity between curation and preservation, arguing that this relationship constitutes a critical resource for engaging contemporary cultural conditions. Rather than treating these practices as distinct, the essay approaches them as overlapping modes of operation that act upon the same institutional, spatial, and historical terrain.

The discussion situates contemporary museum display within a broader historical trajectory, tracing shifts from nineteenth-century total environments and modernist claims of spatial neutrality to the late twentieth-century dominance of the market-driven “white cube.” It argues that this paradigm, while pervasive, has significantly narrowed the museum’s capacity for self-reflection and critique. In response, the essay proposes an understanding of display as an inherently precarious and constructed operation—one that, drawing on the work of Boris Groys and Giorgio Agamben, stages the present at a critical distance as fractured, contradictory, and unresolved.

Through a series of project-based case studies—the Hermitage Museum, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and the Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture in Almaty—the essay demonstrates how curatorial tools can be mobilized to address questions of preservation and modernization, and how preservation logic can, in turn, inform exhibition-making. These projects illustrate alternative approaches in which architectural intervention recedes in favor of authorial regimes of display, subtraction, and selective preservation, allowing historical material to remain active within contemporary experience.

Ultimately, the essay argues for the museum not as a finished or neutral container, but as a “living” and provisional construct—one capable of holding contradictions, exposing temporal tensions, and enabling critical readings of the present through spatial and curatorial means.

This essay is an attempt to contextualize my own work—as an exhibition designer, an architect, and at times an architectural curator—within a broader understanding of the role of museums and exhibition display in the present. Rather than positioning these roles as separate, the text approaches them as overlapping modes of practice that operate on the same cultural terrain. Central to this terrain is the conceptual proximity between curation and preservation, two concerns that are fundamental to my work. I argue that a conscious engagement with this proximity enables the construction of critical readings of specific cultural issues and of the present moment, in general.

The essay does not propose a linear history of museums, nor does it seek to offer a comprehensive theory of exhibition design. It assembles a series of historical observations, institutional critiques, and project-based reflections that together articulate my position.

Museums have always been institutions of the present, even when their collections consist primarily of historic artworks. Beyond functioning as repositories of artefacts, museums—since their emergence in the late eighteenth century—have translated the values of a given society through both the objects they chose to display and the ways in which these objects were installed.

With the rise of nation states in nineteenth-century Europe, museums became instrumental in constructing shared historical narratives of human progress. These narratives supported the political and cultural agendas of the time, often presenting history as a linear, cumulative process leading toward the present. The museum thus operated as a space in which collective identity was staged through displayed artefacts, exhibition design and architecture¹.

Alongside the canonical salon hanging, museums frequently presented immersive total environments—similar to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—, in which the works of art, exhibition furniture, and architecture were conceived as parts of a single concept. A few decades earlier, early Romanticism introduced an alternative paradigm centered on individual contemplation of art and the apparent absence of mediation. This ideal of direct, unframed engagement with the artwork would later be absorbed into the logic of commercial display, where the object is presented as self-sufficient.

The radical social, political, and technological transformations of the early twentieth century produced entirely new forms of art, which in turn demanded new institutional models and display strategies. Experiments at the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas in Europe and the USSR, along with initiatives at the Fogg Museum and later the Museum of Modern Art in the United States, shaped modernist display paradigms grounded in white walls, minimalist architecture, and assertions of spatial neutrality. Although justified differently across decades, these paradigms gradually established a dominant visual and spatial language for exhibiting modern art².

Yet alongside the consolidation of the white wall as a norm, radically different practices emerged. Marcel Duchamp’s exhibitions and Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau reintroduced totalizing and immersive environments that blurred distinctions between artwork, display, and architecture. Unlike the nineteenth-century total installations, which conveyed harmony, cohesion, and cultural affirmation, these early twentieth-century experiments expressed tension, irony, instability and contradiction.

Parallel to these developments, exhibition practices—shaped by emerging psychological theories and by the diffusion of retail display strategies—began to reflect wider societal transformations, most notably the shift from citizen to consumer, particularly evident in the United States from the 1930s onward. In this context, the artwork was increasingly presented as an autonomous entity, ostensibly free of mediation, while the exhibition space was reduced to a neutral setting, in support of the dynamics of the emerging art market.

In the postwar period, the dissolution of a unified historical narrative into multiple narratives profoundly altered museum practice. Permanent displays lost their privileged status, while temporary exhibitions became the dominant mode of presentation. Even permanent collections were increasingly staged as provisional exhibitions, subject to revision and reinterpretation over time.

Within this context, the curator acquired a central and expanded role. No longer limited to the care, classification, and presentation of objects, curators emerged as authors of narratives and mediators between artworks and the public. It is during this period that the tension between museum display and art market display paradigms became particularly evident.

The commercial display paradigm became dominant toward the end of the twentieth century, shaping both new museum buildings and the transformation of existing institutions. The spatial and aesthetic language of the art market—white walls, presumed neutrality, diffused lighting —was absorbed into museum architecture and display.

In my view, the dominance of this paradigm significantly reduced the space for critical reflection, not only in spatial terms but also curatorially. Rather than being precarious, self-critical, ironic, or unscripted—qualities that are essential for remaining receptive to one’s own time—the prevailing museum model tends to reproduce self-celebratory ‘white cubes’, often wrapped in extravagant architectural envelopes and surrounded by an aura of unquestioned importance.

Architecture that once embodied cultural experimentation progressively constrains the forms of experience and imagination the museum was meant to liberate. Internally, the “white cube,” as described by Brian O’Doherty³, functions as a supposedly neutral container that erases historical, political, and social context. Externally, “architectural extravagance and growth in scale function”⁴ mark the institutional relevance.

Paradoxically, museums have never been more numerous nor more popular than in the last three decades. As they have become part of mass culture⁵, their proliferation across continents, driven by tourism and the cultural economy, has generated new prototypes structured around spectacle and consumption. In this shift, the spatial neutrality fully synchronized with market logic: frictionless, anesthetic, and ultimately indistinguishable from one context to another⁶.

Today, when most museums are bathed in the same clinical glow, the challenge, in my view, is not so much to design better exhibitions but to critically interrogate the act of display itself, engaging all available resources—including architecture—to continually reconceptualize it and to restore its capacity to hold contradictions in space and articulate difficult or critical positions.

Architecture, however, also carries its own—though not unrelated—agenda, within which preservation has increasingly been understood as the safeguarding not only of buildings as shells, but of their spatial, material, and symbolic qualities. This understanding stands in open contrast to the widespread museological practice of converting historic interiors into ‘white cubes’, following the art market logic described earlier. There have been and there are, of course, exceptions, and one early yet particularly radical example is Franco Russoli’s interrupted project for the renovation and expansion of Brera.

Russoli’s project—documented in Senza utopia non si fa la realtà. Scritti sul Museo (1952–1977)—offers a compelling alternative to the dominant museum paradigm. Central to Russoli’s thinking was the concept of the “living museum,” initially articulated by Fernanda Wittgens and later developed by Russoli as a dynamic, socially engaged organism. Within this vision, exhibition, curation, education, collecting, production, and the relationship with contemporaneity were continuously questioned and rethought⁷. 

His vision materialized most clearly in a three-year exhibition cycle initiated during the temporary closure of Brera’s permanent collection, in preparation for its restructuring and expansion into Palazzo Citterio as part of the Grande Brera project. The cycle culminated in the 1976 exhibition Processo per un museo (Museum on Trial), which critically dismantled the museum’s institutional components and assumptions.

Across different rooms, the museum was exposed in all its dimensions: as a legal entity, as a concept, as a non-exhibition, as a project, as a construction site, as a space of social gathering and debate, and as a place where contemporary artists entered into dialogue with historic works. In an almost Duchampian spirit, exhibition, bureaucracy, preservation, construction work, and public debate became inseparable and were curated over time as a single process.

A number of recent projects, most of which I or my office GRACE were involved in, in my view, provide examples that reflect similar or complementary approaches to Russoli's vision.

The Hermitage Museum⁸

The Hermitage project is an exploration of what happens when architectural intervention gives way to curatorial thinking.

In the early 2000s, the Hermitage was granted the General Staff Building—located across Palace Square from the Winter Palace—and commissioned OMA to develop a project for its integration into the museum complex.

Unlike institutions such as the Louvre or the British Museum, the Hermitage had remained largely unmodernized due to a long lack of funding. As a result, it preserved an unusual degree of imperfection and functioned almost as an institutional utopia, seemingly uninterested in expansion, while other major museums rapidly increased in scale and “excess” mirroring the rise of the market economy⁹.

The General Staff Building is a complex structure with nearly 800 rooms of varying dimensions, organized around four courtyards. Designed in early 19^th century by Carlo Rossi to house military staff offices, it presented a radically different spatial condition from the rest of the Hermitage. To understand how to work with it, OMA first examined the Hermitage as a whole.

Rem Koolhaas was particularly fascinated by the fact that the Hermitage was already one of the largest museums in the world in terms of collection size, yet it attracted relatively few visitors. This combination of immense scale, extraordinary density of artifacts, and limited public pressure suggested the possibility of a more subtle and contemporary way of engaging with art. Although this assumption later proved optimistic, it shaped OMA’s approach.

The project ultimately became an exercise in quantities on the one side: approximately 1,200 existing rooms, combined with 800 new ones, produced a vast repertoire of conditions. Some rooms were historically protected, others damaged and therefore transformable. On the other, the project looked at museum’s virtues.  By contemporary museums standards, the Hermitage was a disaster: there was barely any climate control, paint peeling off the walls, natural light streaming through the windows. Yet the experience of the art works was exceptionally intense. Given the historical significance of the palace and its location, here art and history coexisted in a completely unmediated way.

For example, Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square hung between white cascading curtains, accompanied by an oversized label, protected by theatrical rope stanchions, and illuminated by a buzzing fluorescent light. Despite—or perhaps because of—this crude set up, the experience of the work was more powerful than in any renovated museum. OMA began to realize that the Hermitage’s failure to modernize had allowed it to preserve a level of intensity and immediacy that had been lost elsewhere. The central question thus became whether it was possible to modernize the museum without damaging this condition and whether Hermitage can become the “prototype for resistance”¹⁰ to the growing excesses of other institutions.

Given that the General Staff Building contained 800 rooms of radically different character, OMA proposed a counterintuitive strategy: rather than intervening architecturally, the architects would “do nothing” and act instead as curators or intellectuals, exploring how the existing stock of rooms could be activated through different authorial regimes.

This included imagining schedules in which different rooms would open and close over time or introducing contemporary art in the highly preserved historic interiors and placing the most valuable historic works in the more neglected rooms. One of the most radical proposals was to dedicate eight rooms each year to individual figures—artists, scientists, or thinkers—and to continue this process over a century, gradually assembling a living archive of the era’s cultural and intellectual production in 800 rooms of the General Staff building.

Koolhaas stated: “All of these insights created a very strong conviction in us that what we at the Hermitage wanted to do was abstain from any architectural work, and act strictly as curators or as intellectuals in seeing whether the stock of rooms and the environment could be enhanced without adding anything new but simply imagining a more authorial regime"¹¹.

The Hermitage research, continued in 2008¹², also prompted a reflection on systems of display. The museum’s elegant vitrines—often dismissed as “invisible” containers—became themselves objects of exhibition, bearing witness to changing philosophies of collecting and display, and thus to the historical development of the museum. By exhibiting empty vitrines in chronological sequence, the project transformed them from neutral supports into protagonists of the museum’s own history.

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

Between 2011 and 2015, I worked as part of OMA team on the transformation of the former restaurant Vremena Goda into the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. This project directly applies some ideas developed for the Hermitage project and, in a way, represents the synthesis of many themes on which OMA and AMO have been working for years.

Among these themes are conservation (or preservation, in OMA’s terms) and a critique of the contemporary museum paradigm—an argument that also forms the basis of this essay.

Founded in 2008, Garage takes its name from its first location: a bus depot designed by the Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov. In 2011, the museum was forced to seek a new location and subsequently occupied an abandoned 1960s building in Gorky Park, commissioning OMA to design the project.

OMA’s strong interest with preservation—particularly with 1960s architecture—was synthesized in the exhibition Cronocaos, presented at the Venice Biennale in 2010¹³. 

In militant tone the exhibition claimed that while the world is being modernized at an increasingly rapid pace, another parallel phenomenon is taking place: ever larger portions of our planet are being ”declared immutable” through “various preservation regimes”. If in the 19th century humanity preserved ancient monuments, today the list of protected heritage has expanded to include concentration camps, casinos, highways or entire cultural landscapes.

Beginning with the French Revolution and the onset of rapid industrialization, concern for preservation grew in direct relation to processes of modernization. The more change is possible, the more it is critical to decide what should remain the same. Besides preserving an ample variety of cultural and natural objects, also the time interval between today and the date of what we decide to preserve is becoming shorter.

This interest has not been uniform across all categories of heritage. In particular, the architecture of the 1960s–1980s—closely associated with social values and a strong public sector—long remained marginal within preservation agendas. With the rise of neoliberalism, this architecture came to be regarded as irrelevant and was often blamed for many of today’s urban and social problems. As a result, until relatively recently it was widely neglected and, in many contexts—including Russia—systematically demolished.

The abandoned building into which Garage decided to move was called Vremena Goda (or Four Seasons in Russian) and was originally conceived as a prototype for a café for 1,200 people, designed by a talented Soviet architect, Igor Vinogradsky. The idea was to replicate many identical cafés across the Soviet Union. Ultimately, only two were built, both in Moscow, and one got demolished in the early 2000s. The building that survived (at Gorky Park), was constructed in 1968 and was very popular for the first 20 years of its existence; after the collapse of the regime in 1991, it was abandoned.

The abandoned building into which Garage decided to move was known as Vremena Goda (Four Seasons in Russian). It was originally conceived as a prototype for a café accommodating up to 1,200 people and was designed by the Soviet architect Igor Vinogradsky. The intention was to replicate this type across the Soviet Union; ultimately, only two such cafés were built, both in Moscow, one of which was demolished in the early 2000s. The surviving building, completed in 1968 in Gorky Park, was widely popular during its first two decades before being abandoned following the collapse of the regime in 1991.

Between the height of its activity and the condition in which we encountered it in 2011, the building had undergone profound transformation. The building was reduced a façade-less ruin. But despite two decades of abandonment, during which the building was exposed to the weather, it was still in good condition, even structurally. More importantly, it preserved a sense of generosity and a collective aura typical of Soviet architecture. It also had good proportions and dimensions, both for accommodating people and for exhibiting art, as well as the beautiful views of the park.

In order to preserve the building and adapt it for the museum programs, the project proposed enclosing it within a new façade composed of three layers of polycarbonate. This new skin would protect the building from the weather and would translate views of the park into abstract images, almost like paintings by Gerhard Richter.

The new façade was conceived as a multifunctional element. Raised more than two meters above ground level, it established a visual connection between the park and the public activities on the museum’s ground floor. It could be strategically illuminated to communicate the museum’s life outward toward the park, while also accommodating emergency staircases and other elements required to meet contemporary safety standards. Crucially, the façade served as a carrier for ventilation ducts and other MEP infrastructure, minimizing their impact within the exhibition spaces. In this way, the façade effectively became a non-declared “junkspace,”¹⁴ mediated by layers of polycarbonate.

At the museum entrance, two façade sections measuring 9 × 11 meters slid vertically. These large doors created a symbolic cut through the central atrium, visually connecting the park to the building’s interior and revealing a double-height space formed by the removal of part of the upper-level slab to accommodate large-scale works. The project thus operated as an envelope–infrastructure that allowed the “ruin” within to be preserved while enabling it to function as a museum.

Museum programs occupied three levels, adapting to the spatial and structural possibilities of the existing building. The more fragmented spaces in the eastern part—where the original core with stairs, services, and kitchens was located—were dedicated to educational and research programs, while the large open spaces in the western area were assigned to exhibitions, projects, and events. The configuration of the existing building thus offered a wide range of conditions for exhibiting art, moving beyond the logic of the white cube and encouraging more varied and site-specific curatorial approaches.

Although the building was largely prefabricated, the project deliberately preserved nearly all its existing components with great care, treating them as if they were fragments of an ancient Roman basilica. This was among the first significant efforts in Moscow to preserve postwar Soviet modernism, and OMA sought to assert that this architecture—despite belonging to a period shaped by a very different social and political agenda—could still be relevant today. In the project, the Soviet past, with all its ideological contradictions, was neither glorified nor condemned, but instead integrated into the spatial experience of the museum.

The exhibitions subsequently hosted within this architecture—ranging from Louise Bourgeois, Thomas Demand, Takashi Murakami, Pavel Pepperstein and other solo or collective shows—inevitably entered into dialogue, or at times into tension, with the building’s history. The near absence of white walls compelled curators to think critically about each exhibition and to make deliberate, site-specific decisions regarding display.

The exhibition “Takashi Muarakami. Under the Radiation Falls” was held in 2017-2018¹⁵. The curatorial text by Ekaterina Inozemtseva declared that the five sections of the exhibition, “each examining a phenomenon in Japanese culture formally and semantically explored by Murakami” structured the exhibition, revealing “the artist’s inquiry into Japanese public consciousness, blurring the boundary between high and low culture […]”¹⁶. 

Across the museum’s 3,500 sqm exhibition space, a distinct spatial strategy was developed for each exhibition chapter, mediating between Murakami’s iconic works and the architecture of the former Soviet public building.

The first chapter Geijutsu (Learning and Technique) addressed the origins of Murakami’s pictorial language. The classical hanging of his works alongside those of traditional Japanese masters in the Skylight Room (one of the two small ‘white cube’ like rooms in the museum – the former kitchen of the soviet restaurant) emphasized a continuity of subject matter and technique. The Little Boy and the Fat Man, the second chapter located in the Central Gallery, examined the impact of August 1945 bombings on postwar Japanese visual culture. A dense assemblage of Murakami’s works, photography, manga, and anime revealed the close relationship between his practice and mass culture. The works were displayed on white mesh panels arranged in a rigid grid, creating a “field condition” that dissolved hierarchies and encouraged multiple interpretive paths within this staged archive.

The third section, Kawaii, immersed visitors in an aesthetic of cuteness and denial, conceived as an escape from memories of war. Four environments along the East Gallery combined recurring elements from Murakami’s oeuvre—bright fabrics, flower wallpaper, gold film, and manga toys—into four immersive installations, the latter inspired by Nakano Broadway in Tokyo. The fourth part of the exhibition, Sutajito, reproduced a functioning fragment of Murakami’s studio. Within a factory-like setting, the artist’s assistants worked during the installation period to execute and complete artworks. After the exhibition opening, the public could observe the Fordist organization of the studio and the intricate logistics underlying the production process.  Finally, Asobi and Kazari section extended Murakami’s interest in ornament beyond the galleries, infiltrating the café, bookshop, lobby, bathrooms and ultimately the façade, where two monumental neon skulls animated the building exterior.

The encounter between the art and the building, mediated by the exhibition scenography, took various forms: coexistence, dialogue, collision, substitution, which generated new ways of reading both Murakami’s work and the building itself.

The exhibition design alternated the raw building walls, the white metallic mesh or wallpaper as paintings’ backdrop, each deforming the perception of the works. Set against the Soviet bricks and tiles, Murakami’s superflat paintings appeared even ‘flatter’, their precision resulted inhuman compared to the raw and slopy soviet construction details, while when installed on the wallpaper they playfully blurred the boundary between art and product design. While this contrast and contextualization initially unsettled the artist, it ultimately prompted the production of new works conceived in direct response to architecture. For example, cute monsters’ heads were playfully suspended over the soviet mosaic in the foyer depicting a young floating woman, who represented autumn. One of the monster’s colorful tongue reached toward the figure’s hand, banally echoing the gesture from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. Beyond this intentionally “easy” analogy, the monsters’ presence freed the mosaic from its monumentality, transforming it into a quirky retro anime. At the same time, it revealed how the Soviet composition and its subdued tones resisted the consumerist pressure to become mere entertainment.

In a completely different way, the 2015 exhibition Structures of Existence: The Cells of Louise Bourgeois¹⁷ seamlessly merged with the building, as if it had always been part of it. The unique series of sculptural environments that Bourgeois created in the last two decades of her life seemed either to mimic elements of the equipment within the polycarbonate façade or unrestored fragments of the museum itself. This blurring of the boundary between art and architecture transformed the building into the largest, yet still very intimate, ‘cell,’ absorbing the entire activity of the museum.

Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture. “Beginning” and “Open Archive. Almaty”

Conceived as an announcement of a future cultural center, Beginning, a two-month event held in the abandoned former Soviet cinema in Almaty, Kazakhstan, anticipated the museum in its absence, framing it as a process rather than a completed institution¹⁸. 

The project questioned the very notion of the museum as a finished space, suggesting that, at times, working with limited means to expose forgotten and hidden elements can produce an image of the present that is both unexpected and more appropriate. The building, constructed in 1964 based on a standard Soviet design, originally featured a vast cinema hall with a panoramic screen and a double-height foyer adorned with a large sgraffito by Yevgeny Sidorkin, a prominent local monumental artist. In the early 2000s, interior renovations fragmented the generous scale of the architecture in order to make it commercially viable: the cinema hall was subdivided into two smaller halls and a nightclub, while the foyer was cut by a heavy mezzanine. The sgraffito was believed to have been destroyed.

The proposal by GRACE was structured around three programmatic blocks corresponding to the three main parts of the building: an architectural exhibition on Almaty’s modernism and a public program in the cinema halls; an exhibition of local artists in the former nightclub, curated by Meruert Kalieva; and the presentation of the building itself in the lobby.

Because the building was awaiting a major future reconstruction—now completed by the British architect Asif Khan¹⁹—we, as exhibition architects and curators, were permitted to undertake interventions more radical than those typically allowed within exhibition design. Rather than adding new layers, we chose to work through subtraction, removing later architectural additions. This strategy exposed the building’s history, revealing both the generosity of the original space and the ‘inevitable’ violence it had undergone during the post-Soviet period. A simulated archive of Almaty’s modernist architecture²⁰, presented on large inclined panels, cascaded from the steps of the reunified cinema hall, while contemporary Central Asian artists developed subtle, poetic, and ironic works responding to the space of the nightclub.

Most poignantly, the accidental rediscovery of the lost Soviet sgraffito beneath later renovations – cut by large steel beams for the support of the mezzanine -  became the point at which curatorial intent and preservation converged most clearly.

During its two months of existence, this provisional version of Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture and its public program generated significant debate on Soviet heritage, post- and decolonial narratives, and the capacity of Kazakhstan’s contemporary art scene to critically engage with its own past and present— embodying the idea of the “living museum”, introduced by Fernanda Wittgens and later Franco Russoli for Brera.

The museum may be read as a space where a provisional awareness of the present is constructed through all-encompassing (total) acts of display. In Boris Groys’s terms, museum exhibitions—or installations—stage the precariousness of the present itself, placing the visitor within a critically scrutinized ‘here and now’²¹. Not coincidentally, Tselinny, after full renovation, has embraced exactly these words to describe their institutional agenda and program. “Here is about Tselinny’s physical space where various formats of events are happening such as art projects, films programme, contemporary theatre, music and other experimental forms. Now is based on the research projects that are occurring in the moment and continuously in the future to create an intellectual space enhanced by engagements with artists, theorists and public intellectuals from various disciplinary, cultural, social and ideological perspectives. […] Tselinny center strives to continue regional cooperation and aims to strengthen the dialogue between the intellectual and artistic communities.”²²

In this sense, the museum operates in close resonance with Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of what it means to be contemporary: it creates a space in which the present is held at a critical distance and exposed through its fractures, delays, and unresolved tensions²³.

Preservation follows a similar logic. It is an active process of selection, interpretation, and framing. By choosing which fragments or elements are maintained and which are altered, the architect constructs a contemporary installation through which preserved traces of the past communicate readings that are relevant to the present.

The proximity between curation and preservation therefore emerges as a powerful conceptual and methodological resource for both disciplines. The projects discussed in this essay illustrate how borrowing curatorial tools can address issues of preservation and modernization, as in the Hermitage, while applying preservation logic to exhibition-making, as in Tselinny, can enable complex and critical conversations about contemporary cultural conditions. Russoli’s radical example at Brera ultimately dissolves the distinction altogether, treating exhibition, construction, preservation, and institutional self-reflection as manifestations of the same substance.