Published by Medd Editions. Release Date: November 14, 2025
What does it mean to curate an exhibition that cannot exist? What if the artwork is missing, misattributed, unmade,or entirely imaginary? What if the audience is the object, the institution is the medium, and the wall label is the only relic that remains?
In Curating the Unreal, acclaimed curator and theorist Lukas Bellamy turns his forensic, poetic, and often dryly humorous eye to the space between exhibition and speculation. Following the cult success of his long-awaited return to curating (THAT WHICH IS NOT SHOWN, Marseille, 2025), Bellamy presents a book-length exploration of exhibitions that never happened, and perhaps never could,but which haunt the practice of curating like beautiful mistakes.
Part field manual, part philosophical provocation, Curating the Unreal unfolds across three acts:
• I. The Absent Show , on vanished works, ghost collections, and lost objects catalogued only in footnotes.
• II. The Impossible Frame , on galleries made of air, curating for non-human spectators, and the museum as mirage.
• III. The Unrealised Archive , proposals, fabrications, hoaxes, and dreams; annotated drafts of exhibitions that never took place.
The book includes 26 short-form exhibition proposals, richly illustrated with archival ephemera, imagined loan agreements, hand-drawn floor plans, and textual artifacts. Highlights include:
• A Show for an Audience That Hasn’t Been Born
• The Museum of Misreadings
• All the Wall Text, None of the Art
• Works Left Behind in Artists’ Studios, 1983,1991
• Everything That Was Almost Curated and Then Abandoned
Praise for Lukas Bellamy
“Lukas Bellamy may be the only curator working today who can turn refusal into an art form.”
, Cold Magazine
“A philosopher of the exhibition, or perhaps its undertaker.”
, The White Review
“This book reads like the dream-logic of a perfect biennale.”
, Carolyn Ekstrom, author of Negative Spaces in Contemporary Display
Curating the Unreal is a necessary text for curators, artists, students of exhibition studies, and anyone interested in the beautifully unstable line between fiction and form. As Bellamy writes in his introduction:
“Curation begins not with objects, but with doubt.”
