CCS Bard Presents Two New Exhibitions this Summer, on View from June 14 through September 7

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY—This summer, CCS Bard invites visitors to experience the galleries in entirely new ways with two new exhibitions. Personal Protocols and Other Preferences: A Collective Exhibition with Work by Michael Beutler, Esra Ersen, and Kirstine Roepstorff will be on view in the CCS Bard Galleries. I’ve Got Something in My Eye, a new project by artist team Bik Van der Pol, will be exhibited in the Hessel Museum of Art. Both are on view from June 14 through September 7, 2008. Admission is free; museum hours are Wednesdays through Sundays, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.

For Personal Protocols and Other Preferences: A Collective Exhibition with Work by Michael Beutler, Esra Ersen, and Kirstine Roepstorff, three Berlin-based artists have worked on site making art that engages intensively with situations marked by the reality of particular times and places. Michael Beutler has invented an ingenious system to produce nine-foot-tall walls made of colorful paper. The new walls radically alter the experience of the pristine white cube gallery space, in which Esra Ersen, originally from Istanbul, is showing an engaging documentary video with street children in her hometown. Ersen is also showing a film following the radical makeover of Helen, an elderly woman and longtime resident of Liverpool, a city that is undergoing major urban transformation. Kirstine Roepstorff’s textile-like collages, some of which are made directly on the wall, can partly be viewed from a tower constructed by her colleague Michael Beutler.

There is a crafty aspect to the work Personal Protocols and Other Preferences, which takes do-it-yourself techniques seriously as a way of questioning what is standard, whether it is man-made machines, videos filmed with a handheld camera, or textile-like collages. Although the physical outcomes are radically different, all three of these artists strictly follow their own personal protocols of production. Wanting to challenge the neutral look of the bare CCS Bard Galleries, the artists decided to think about the exhibition as a “collective exhibition” rather than a normal group exhibition. In other words, in a common endeavor a number of decisions would be made collectively, particularly those pertaining to the installation. Personal Protocols and Other Preferences is curated by Maria Lind.


Concurrently with Personal Protocols and Other Preferencs, CCS Bard presents I’ve Got Something in My Eye in the Hessel Museum of Art, a new project by Rotterdam-based artist team Bik Van der Pol. The exhibition brings together more than 80 works by 40 artists in the Marieluise Hessel Collection, selections from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, works by Bik Van der Pol, and ephemera from the CCS Bard curatorial archive. The circulation of knowledge and re-use of existing and left-over spaces, forms, and situations are important strategic tools in Bik Van Der Pol’s work. Much of their work may also be described as context-sensitive and constructively critical: that is, they examine a particular context and question the functions of art, including those of art institutions.

Bik Van der Pol have chosen to include works from the Van Abbemuseum collection in order to invite visitors to consider both the parallels and divergences between the two collections, as well as between the two institutions that house and interpret them. The Van Abbemuseum (www.vanabbemuseum.nl/engels), located in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, is one of the leading museums for modern and contemporary art in Europe. Since opening in 1936, the Van Abbemuseum has built an extensive, internationally renowned collection of more than 2,700 works of art, including works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Joseph Beuys, Lawrence Weiner, Douglas Gordon, Marina Abramovic, and Paul McCarthy.

The opening on June 14 will also mark the completion of Lisi Raskin’s project, Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station, as well as the reopening of Christian Philipp Müller’s Hudson Valley Tastemakers, an earth sculpture on the grounds of Bard College originally installed in 2003.

Mobile Observation (Transmitting and Receiving) Station was commissioned by CCS Bard as part of its first artist-in-residence program. On April 14, 2008, Raskin departed CCS Bard in a converted cargo van for a month-long journey across the American west to visit sites of nuclear testing and development. From this mobile observation station, art works and ephemera were mailed back to headquarters at the Center for Curatorial Studies, where they have been processed and displayed by CCS Bard graduate students in a post office/receiving station constructed specifically for the project located in the Center’s Audrey and Sydney Irmas Atrium.

Hudson Valley Tastemakers is a permanent installation on the Bard College campus that examines the specific tastes of foods resulting from the changing nature, soil, and climate of the Hudson Valley. Comprised of six ramp-planters that are filled with soil from Putnam, Dutchess, Columbia, Greene, Ulster, and Orange Counties, the project contains both planned and spontaneous vegetation. The length of each planter is determined by the proportionate farmland still available in the county. This summer CCS Bard will reinvigorate the project with new plantings, including Calendula Zeolights, Amaranth Burgundy, and Pepper Chile Pasilla Bajio.

The opening reception is Saturday, June 14, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. Limited free seating is available to the opening reception on a chartered bus from New York City. The bus returns to New York after the opening. CCS Bard is offering guided tours of the exhibitions and projects by Bik Van der Pol, Michael Beutler, Esra Ersen, Kirstine Roepstoff, Lisi Raskin, and Christian Philipp Müller on Saturday June 14 and Sunday June 15. For details and reservations, please call CCS Bard at 845.758.7598, write [email protected] or visit www.bard.edu/ccs.

For more information, please call CCS Bard at 845.758.7598, write [email protected], or visit www.bard.edu/ccs

Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) is an art and research center dedicated to the study of art and curatorial practices from the 1960s to the present day. The Center’s graduate program is specifically designed to deepen students’ understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating exhibitions of contemporary art. With more than 9,500 square feet of gallery space and an extensive library and curatorial archive, CCS Bard offers students intellectual grounding and actual experience within a museum.

In November 2006, CCS Bard inaugurated the Hessel Museum of Art, a new 17,000-square-foot building for exhibitions curated from the Marieluise Hessel Collection of more than 1,700 contemporary works. The new museum features intimate rooms encircling two large central galleries, and is scaled so that approximately 10 to 15 percent of the collection can be shown at any one time. The Hessel Museum extends the reach of the CCS Bard exhibition program, providing a place to test out the possibilities for exhibition making, using the remarkable resources of the collection as a whole.

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Media Contact CCS Bard Contact
Mark Primoff Jaime Henderson
845.758.7412 845.758.7598
[email protected] [email protected]

This event was last updated on 08-29-2008

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