Who Owns the Pedestal

The exhibition Who Owns the Pedestals examines the pedestal not as a neutral support but as a politically charged construction: a mechanism that regulates visibility, determines who or what gets elevated and seen, and which establishes hierarchies within art and public space. Drawing on Brancusi’s radical re-conception of the pedestal as an active sculptural element (rather than mere support), and on contemporary examples like London’s Fourth Plinth — empty for 150 years before becoming a platform for contemporary art in 1998 — the exhibition connects historical debates about monuments and memory to today’s global reckonings over which histories get commemorated and which are erased. It also turns attention to the invisible labor (conservators, technicians, curators, installation workers) that sustains the art world’s own «pedestals,» treating this de-heroization as a form of political care. Engaging sculpture’s expanded field — through photography, video, sound, and image-making technologies, and informed by Rosalind Krauss’s theory and new materialism — the works in the exhibition approach objects as active, relational agents rather than passive matter. Ultimately, the exhibition shifts the question from who owns the pedestal to who has the right to reshape it, presenting the pedestal as an open, unstable, and shared terrain where power, memory, and history are renegotiated.