The Broken Timeline: distant.gallery

The Broken Timeline (TBT) presents historical exhibition projects that were curated online. Inevitably partial and subjective, TBT burrows back in time to present a lineage of web-based curatorial projects that are too often unseen, neglected or ignored by the mainstream artworlds and their discourses. For common.garden we made a small selection of our favourite projects that highlight the intricate socio-technicalities of the web. Following and subverting technical trends, and despite being often short-lived and thus lacking a historical memory, these projects present new ways of audience engagement, question the value of authorship and open the possibility to reconfigure traditional models and methods for presenting, accessing and distributing art. Thereby they are challenging established museum values and advancing alternative ways of understanding art stewardship, curatorial authority, and public access.