In VCE AME Unit 3 AoS 3, students must develop the ability to identify and analyse the curatorial considerations that shape exhibitions, and to understand the relationships between artworks and between artists within an exhibition context. This is a higher-order analytical skill central to the exhibition proposal and written examination.
Curatorial considerations are the factors and questions a curator weighs when making decisions about an exhibition. Key considerations include:
Theme and rationale: What is the central idea unifying the exhibition? How does each artwork contribute to or complicate this idea?
Selection: Which works best serve the rationale? What is excluded and why? Does the selection represent the artist fairly?
Relationships between works: How do individual works speak to, contrast with or build on each other when displayed together?
Spatial arrangement: How does the placement of works in the space shape the viewer’s experience and understanding?
Scale and proportion relationships: How do the relative sizes of adjacent works affect each other’s visual impact?
Sequence and narrative: In what order will visitors encounter works? Does the sequence create a progression of ideas or experience?
Audience: Who is the intended viewer? How does the exhibition design serve their access and understanding?
Didactic information: How much interpretive support do viewers need? What should be explained and what should remain open?
Works in an exhibition enter into relationships with each other that produce meanings beyond what each work communicates individually. Relationships may be:
Thematic relationships: Two works addressing the same subject matter or conceptual territory from different angles.
- Example: Two works exploring environmental loss — one through representation, one through abstraction — placed adjacent to invite comparison.
Formal relationships: Works sharing visual characteristics (similar palette, scale, compositional structure) creating visual continuity.
Contrasting relationships: Works placed in deliberate opposition — large beside small; gestural beside precise — to create tension that invites analysis.
Dialogic relationships: Works that appear to “respond” to each other, as if in conversation.
Sequential/narrative relationships: Works presented in sequence that suggest a progression (temporal, emotional, conceptual).
When multiple artists are exhibited together, curatorial analysis must address:
REMEMBER: Relationships between works are not accidental — they are produced by curatorial decisions. Strong analysis names the specific relationship, explains how it is created (through placement, visual similarity, thematic connection, etc.) and articulates what meaning or experience results.
EXAM TIP: VCAA frequently asks students to “identify and analyse curatorial considerations” in exhibitions they have visited. Do not just describe what you saw — analyse the decisions that produced it. Use language like “the curator placed X beside Y to create a contrast between…” or “the selection of works spanning three decades allowed the curator to demonstrate the evolution of…”
APPLICATION: “In the exhibition proposal I developed for my three selected artists, I placed Rosalie Gascoigne’s grid-based work opposite Callum Morton’s architectural imagery because both address the Australian landscape through found and constructed objects rather than direct depiction. The juxtaposition invites viewers to consider how place can be evoked through material accumulation rather than representation.”
