Renumber the Show
Renumber the Show is a Graphic Design graduation project by Napisa Leelasuphapong at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Belgium (Class of 2017). The project focuses on using the exhibition catalogues of 557,087 and 955,000—found in seven museum libraries in Belgium and neighboring countries—as materials for reconstructing the past exhibitions.
The original catalogues of these two exhibitions came as a set of 138 unnumbered 4” x 6” index cards enclosed in a manila envelope. This was an unconventional format for an art catalogue at the time, as it mimicked bureaucratic documents of the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of featuring images and dimensions of artworks, each card contained a variety of information such as artists’ biographies, notes, and sketch drawings filled in by the participating artists themselves.
The aim of the project was to reconstruct the past conceptual art exhibitions 557,087 and 955,000—which took place in the 1970s—through graphic design. Each exhibition featured more than 60 artists and was curated and organized by Lucy R. Lippard: 557,087 in 1969 at the Seattle Contemporary Art Pavilion, and 955,000 in 1970 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Two more exhibitions were later held under similar numerical titles, each reflecting the population of the host city. Collectively, these exhibitions became known as the Number Shows.
The project was supervised by Bas Rogiers, with co-supervision by Johan Pas and Valentijn Goethals.