When I was asked to create the architecture for “The Promises of the Past,” there was no crystallized concept, no definite vision of the exhibition as a whole—just a preliminary list of the featured artists and works. I suggested creating a linear exhibition that would allow the curators to introduce a narrative, but of course linear does not necessarily mean straight: The first drawing I presented was simply a zigzag. I suggested that each work be presented on a single wall. The curators liked the idea, so that became the design principle; their job was to prepare the sequence of the works. The initial propositions, both mine (the exhibition’s geometry) and the curators’ (the narrative), developed through discussions of the relations among the individual pieces and the architectural armature. So it was very much a collaborative process.

The exhibition grew, works were added, the narrative kept being redefined, and because the works were all interconnected—organically linked with everything else through this zigzagging structure—even the smallest change meant the entire thing had to be modified. This is not a geometry that I devised for aesthetics’ sake, to give the form an interesting look. It’s responsive, reactive—it reflects the fact that some adjoining works have to be separated from each other, located on the opposite sides of an acute angle, while others need to confront each other or be juxtaposed. It’s related to the curatorial concept that the exhibition brings together the works of artists from different generations and countries, artists whose practices could be seen as parallel even if they never actually met (the borders inside Eastern Europe were sometimes much stricter than those between East and West). For example, in this show the critiques of painting undertaken by Július Koller, Edward Krasinski, and Mangelos are shown together for the first time. In the same way, the confrontation between Paweł Althamer and Ion Grigorescu—the spiritual line in artistic practice—is stressed. The structure also needed to exert some kind of control over the viewing experience. What I mean is that there are two kinds of exhibitions in general—those that you view in sequence and those that you view chaotically. I can give the example of my show at Schaulager in Basel—the works were loosely scattered around the space and could be viewed in various sequences, from various distances, an unlimited number of viewing possibilities. At the Centre Pompidou, the mode of reception is defined, as in a film where you watch the successive scenes. You experience it in a linear manner; the viewing direction is clearly indicated by the construction’s architecture. So there’s a tension between this idea of the unruliness of the history being presented and the concept of indicating a particular viewing sequence.

There were some obvious challenges in approaching an exhibition design this way. The curves in the wall, their widths—which are tailored to the width of each object—the angles of intersection: All are derived from specific properties of the pieces. So the design went through many permutations, changing constantly. If, say, I moved one corner, expanded one angle, I then needed to shift another partition, and then the entrance to the niche became too narrow and needed to be widened, and so on—a domino effect.

Of course there were other pressures exerted on the exhibition’s final shape, e.g., museum regulations, such as the minimum distance between the walls. These are set, given by the institution. The niche entrances need to be of a proper width to accommodate the flow of people during the opening and the exhibition itself. Then, too, the final effect is a reflection of the artists’ requirements as to how their works should be displayed, the philosophies of their galleries, and so on. Conservation requirements (some works must be shown in their original frames, in a certain manner, and so on) played a significant role as well. And I accepted this. Of course, I took part in the negotiations, advised on the choice of the frames, the captions, and so on. One issue was that we didn’t want to place anything in front of the walls, but rather wanted to actually embed everything in the structure. That is why all the objects, e.g., sculptures, are in recessed cabinets. They can be viewed from the front, like 3-D pictures. Even the video monitors have been set into the wall. You don’t see them as objects—they look like projections, and there are also classic wall projections and rear-screen projections. The same with most of the two-dimensional works—paintings, photographs—except that some had to be covered by glass. I would have shown them differently, but I couldn’t because of the conservation regulations. What we managed with a few of the photographs, though, was to prepare special new prints that can be stuck directly to the wall. So there were deviations from the rules we’d set for ourselves; the structure—physical and conceptual—wasn’t rigid. And of course, there are artists whose works are hard to format and that can’t be fit into this kind of architecture at all. For instance, Daniel Knorr’s Capillaire [2010] is a pipe filled with tear gas, an intervention standing apart from the exhibition structure, that imitates the colored pipes all over the Pompidou. It has to stretch across the gallery or it loses its meaning. The point was not to format and standardize everything, but to reflect the individualities.