CCS Master’s Degree Candidates Curate Series of Fifteen Exhibitions and Projects that Include Work by over 80 Internationally Known Contemporary Artists

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—This spring the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presents a series of 10 exhibitions at the CCS Bard Galleries, curated by second-year students in its graduate program in curatorial studies, including work by more than 80 internationally known contemporary artists. Five additional projects curated by second-year students will be presented outside of the Center for Curatorial Studies in various media and venues. These exhibitions and projects are the culmination of the students’ work for the master’s degree.

The CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College are open Wednesday through Sunday from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. All CCS Bard exhibitions and public programs are free and open to the public. Limited free seating is available on a chartered bus that leaves from New York City for the March 8 and April 19 openings. The bus returns to New York City after the opening. Reservations are required; call 845.758.7598 or e-mail [email protected].

The first of two series of exhibitions opens on Sunday, March 8, with a reception from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., and is on view through Sunday, April 5. The exhibitions are: Drifting Histories, including work by Julieta Aranda, Rosa Barba, Andrea Geyer, and Korpys/Löffler, curated by Anaïs Lellouche; Vital Archive | Revisiting Group Material’s AIDS Timeline, curated by Sabrina Locks; Entr’acte, including work by Cosima von Bonin, Tom Burr, Catherine Sullivan and Artur ?mijewski, curated by Fionn Meade, Lora Sana: I Was There and Not There, a solo project by artist Carola Dertnig, curated by Wendy Vogel; and How to do things with Words, including work by Sharon Hayes, Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, and Carey Young, curated by Jess Wilcox.

The second series of exhibitions opens on Sunday, April 19, with a reception from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., and is on view through Sunday, May 24. The exhibitions are: Fixation, a solo exhibition with work by Christof Migone, curated by Mireille Bourgeois; Changing Light Bulbs in Thin Air, including works by Christian Andersson, Tauba Auerbach, Brian Clifton, Zak Kitnick, Runo Lagomarsino, Adam Putnam, Matthew Sheridan Smith, Mungo Thomson, and Garth Weiser, curated by Summer Guthery; About the object, a solo project by artist Amy Patton, curated by Christina Linden; Noise Pollution, a solo exhibition of work by Marisa Olson, curated by Gene McHugh; and the everyday, a solo exhibition of work by Leslie Hewitt, curated by Kate Menconeri.

The five projects curated by second-year students will be represented in documentary material and ephemera during the second series of exhibitions opening on April 19. The projects are:  Dealing in Futures, with work by Melanie Gilligan, curated by Zeynep Oz; SESSIONS: Con Verse Sensations, curated by Katerina Llanes; COLUMN: including works by Jens Haaning, Dexter Sinister, Erick Beltrán, Bernd Krauss, Interboro, and Bard College Studio Arts Program senior students, curated by Marion Ritter; PILOT, curated  by Bartholomew Ryan; and Gets Under the Skin, including works by Bernd Behr, Johanna Billing, Michael Blum, Josef Dabernig, Domènec, Miklós Erhardt, Terence Gower, Pierre Huyghe, Lars Laumann, Caitlin Masley, Ursula Mayer, Anna Molska, Sadie Murdoch, Pia Rönicke, Caspar Stracke, and Judi Werthein, curated by Hajnalka Somogyi.

Concurrently on view with these exhibitions, in the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art is In A Room Anything Can Happen, an exhibition of works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, including works by Janine Antoini, Joseph Beuys, Valie Export, Mona Hatoum, Donald Judd, William Kentridge, Christian Marclay, Bruce Nauman, Raymond Pettibon, and many others.   Curated by eight first-year graduate students at CCS Bard, In A Room Anything Can Happen opens on Tuesday, March 17, and will be on view through May 24.

Student-curated exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard are made possible with support is from the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg; Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation; and by the Patrons, Supporters, and Friends of the Center for Curatorial Studies. Additional support  is provided by the Monique Beudert Award Fund.  Special thanks to the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

For additional information, call 845.758.7598, e-mail [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 exhibition, education, and research center dedicated to the study of art and curatorial practices from the 1960s to the present day. In addition to the CCS Bard Galleries and the newly inaugurated Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard houses the Marieluise Hessel Collection of more than 2,000 contemporary works, as well as an extensive library and curatorial archive that are accessible to the general public. The Center’s two-year graduate program in curatorial studies is specifically designed to deepen students’ understanding of the intellectual and practical tasks of curating contemporary art. Exhibitions are presented year-round in the CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art, providing students with the opportunity to work with world-renowned artists and curators. The exhibition program and the collection also serve as the basis for a wide range of public programs and activities exploring art and its role in contemporary society.


CCS Bard Spring Thesis Exhibitions—Series One
March 8 – April 5, 2009
CCS Bard Galleries, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Opening reception Sunday, March 8, 1:00–4:00 p.m.

Drifting Histories
Artists:  Julieta Aranda, Rosa Barba, Andrea Geyer, and Korpys/Löffler
Curator: Anaïs Lellouche
The artworks in Drifting Histories address how geography and memory can offer alternative mappings of history. The works create portraits of sites that embody a high degree of realism, as the information is drawn from historical facts, but has been reconfigured and interpreted by the artists to shed new light on the history of place. The works in Drifting Histories range from installation and photography to film. Their artistic strategy is to challenge the mainstream narrative of history, raising our awareness of the means through which history is constructed, conveyed, and remembered.

Vital Archive | Revisiting Group Material’s AIDS Timeline
Curator: Sabrina Locks
Selection of artwork, documentation, archival material, and new research around the exhibition AIDS Timeline (1989) created by New York City–based artist collaborative Group Material (1979–1996).

In the 1980s Group Material put forth a model of collaborative exhibition-making as an art practice that sought to resituate the grounds, work, material, and politics of art. AIDS Timeline examined the landscape of AIDS in the United States from its status as medical epidemic circa 1979 through its construction and mutation into widespread cultural crisis by 1989, materializing a cross-section of societal responses to AIDS through artworks, mass media, medical accounts, government policy, and grassroots and activist initiatives. AIDS Timeline took place at the Berkeley University Art Museum MATRIX Gallery from November 1989 to January 1990 and was re-versioned for the Wadsworth Athenaeum MATRIX Gallery in Hartford, Connecticut (September–November 1990) and in New York City for the 1991 Whitney Biennial.

Vital Archive revisits this historical exhibition through research in its vast archive, tracing material and social relations produced by AIDS Timeline and partaking in an ongoing and ephemeral process of historical inquiry and formulation of cultural memory.

Entr’acte
Artists:  Cosima von Bonin, Tom Burr, Catherine Sullivan, and Artur ?mijewski
Curator: Fionn Meade
Entr’acte is a group exhibition that explores how four artists adopt and often invert elements of theater and dramaturgy in their work. By invoking the entr’acte as an agile form that exists between—and often in productive tension with—more elaborate and established formats, the exhibition looks at how such conventional themes as persona, set design, and acting the other are upended and fragmented in their work.  

Tom Burr’s bulletin-board collages and Cosima von Bonin’s “Lappen” (“rags”), canvas-textile pictures, explore the rumor and innuendo of celebrity and invented personae, while Catherine Sullivan presents a single-channel film collage that revisits the obsessive pathos that existed between theater critic Kenneth Tynan and silent screen starlet Louise Brooks, and Artur ?mijewski’s videos document the performative potential of three highly charged walks.


Lora Sana: I Was There and Not There
Artist:  Carola Dertnig
Curator:  Wendy Vogel
Lora Sana is the result of Carola Dertnig’s research on Viennese Actionism, a performance-based artistic movement of the 1960s founded against the postwar conservative climate in Austria. Parts of oral interviews with marginalized female participants in Actionist performances form the basis for the fictive figure of Lora Sana (Actionist, age 62), who is presented in overdrawn images of these performances. Lora Sana creates a performative rewriting of art history through a feminist perspective, scrutinizing gender roles and identities for fictitious documentation, memory, and historiography.  

Conceived especially for presentation at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, Lora Sana: I Was There and Not There includes an installation of reproduced images from the Lora Sana series, text, and a performance for the opening on March 8, 2009. The performance juxtaposes parts of earlier live actions by Dertnig and documentation of the Lora Sana project with historical and potentially fictitious documents related to Viennese Actionism.


How to do things with Words
Artists:  Sharon Hayes, Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, Adam Pendleton, and Carey Young
Curator:  Jess Wilcox
How to do things with Words is concerned with the ways that language shapes contemporary life. The artists represented in the exhibition employ conventional modes of communication in unconventional ways, underscoring the rhetorical and performative techniques that render words effective.  


For additional information, call 845.758.7598, e-mail [email protected], or visit www.bard.edu/ccs.


CCS Bard Spring Thesis Exhibitions—Series Two
April 19 – May 24, 2009
CCS Bard Galleries, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Opening reception Sunday, April 19, 1:00–4:00 p.m.

Fixation
Artist: Christof Migone
Curator: Mireille Bourgeois
Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Christof Migone revisits past works in a new context. Fixation is simultaneously the fixed point of an object set in time and space and the trajectory of thought from one idea to another in search of an end point.

Changing Light Bulbs in Thin Air
Artists: Christian Andersson, Tauba Auerbach, Brian Clifton, Zak Kitnick, Runo Lagomarsino, Adam Putnam, Matthew Sheridan Smith, Mungo Thomson, and Garth Weiser
Curator: Summer Guthery
Changing Light Bulbs in Thin Air brings together a constellation of works by nine artists under the framework of a novel, House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, interested in shifts and breaks in the flow of comprehension and perception.

About the object
Artist:  Amy Patton
Curator: Christina Linden
This commission started as a conversation about an ambiguously labeled Egyptian artifact in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In response, artist Amy Patton traveled to Cairo to visit the place from which the object had been removed. A descent into the belly of a pyramid led to a video shoot in which the hairpin/magic-wand becomes an actor along with artist, curator, and viewer. Additional footage makes an object out of the space of the museum.

This work, part of a year-long collaboration between Patton and curator Christina Linden, took form as a residency at Cairo's Contemporary Image Collective, then as a commission for SculptureCenter's “In Practice” series.

Noise Pollution
Artist:  Marisa Olson
Curator: Gene McHugh
Technology has brought increased efficiency and choice. However, it has also increased the amount of pollution—discursive and environmental—that infiltrates the lives of those who use it. In Noise Pollution, Brooklyn-based artist Marisa Olson addresses the twin concerns of increased informational “noise” and the largely hidden costs of technology on the natural environment.


the everyday
Artist:  Leslie Hewitt
Curator: Kate Menconeri
Leslie Hewitt’s first solo museum exhibition, the everyday, premieres a full series of her signature photographic works—Riffs on Real Time—along with a suite of floor sculptures, gouache drawings on wood, and a site-specific architectural intervention in the CCS Bard gallery space where her work is installed.

This work highlights Hewitt’s interest in fluid notions of time, memory, and meaning, and the futility of documenting or trying to hold life still. With photography, sculpture, and drawing, she isolates ephemera of the everyday—snapshots, magazine pages, spine-weary books, and the residue of mass culture—to reconsider the shifting personal, collective, and political meaning of objects. She plays with the logic of the camera as a tool to confront and transform perspective, and creates a space that challenges the ways in which culture is documented, archived, and experienced.


For additional information, call 845.758.7598, e-mail [email protected], or visit www.bard.edu/ccs.


CCS Bard Student-Curated Thesis Projects
Spring 2009
CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

All projects will be represented during the opening reception at CCS Bard on Sunday, April 19, 1:00–4:00 p.m.

SESSIONS: Con Verse Sensations
Curator:  Katerina Llanes

SESSIONS is a feminist collaborative art project that reimagines the act of conversation as a politic for self-directed learning.

Envisioning art as play, SESSIONS: Con Verse Sensations takes the shape of a print-it-yourself book, to be released as part of the student-curated thesis exhibitions at CCS Bard. In both form and content, the book invokes the three-way theme of “Con”—pirating; “Verse”—language;  and “Sensations”—touch. Participation becomes central to the project and its distribution by means of sharing resources, intimacies, and engaging in serious play.


Dealing in Futures
Artist: Melanie Gilligan
Curator: Zeynep Oz
Dealing in Futures (Lines and Forms of Policy Making) is a multipart project, which consists of an artist residency, co-organization of a technology conference, and the publishing of a book. During her residency at Bard College in March, Melanie Gilligan will research caricature as a form of drawing and political practice. Out of this research, a script will be commissioned, which will be published along with Gilligan’s earlier performance/video scripts. Crisis in the Credit System, another project by Gilligan, will be presented at the “Dealing in Futures” conference, organized by the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Bard College in conjunction with this project.

In Crisis in the Credit System, the artist deconstructs the terms of finance and its effects beyond the world of finance. The“Dealing in Futures” conference concentrates on information infrastructures and how these infrastructures affect the way we build our futures.
 
COLUMN:   
Artists:  Jens Haaning, Dexter Sinister, Erick Beltrán, Bernd Krauss, Interboro, and Bard College Studio Arts Program Senior Students
Curator:  Marion Ritter
A series of commissions created specifically for the Poughkeepsie Journal, a daily local newspaper in Dutchess County.  Everyday life processes and the specifics of the newspaper will characterize and define the works in this circulating exhibition, which will appear weekly between April 10 and May 24.


PILOT
Three live radio programs broadcast on WXBC Bard Radio April 28, May 5, and May 12,
8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Curator:  Bartholomew Ryan
A three–part radio series that considers 21st century strategies for the manifesto, each program in PILOT will include interviews, conversations, commissioned works, readings, and debates with artists, academics, and curators. The series can be thought of as a “distributed manifesto,” one that makes clear demands without ever stating them.

Gets Under the Skin
Films and videos on modernist architecture (locations: Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, and Preston Theater, Bard College)
Artists:  Bernd Behr, Johanna Billing, Michael Blum, Josef Dabernig, Domènec, Miklós Erhardt, Terence Gower, Pierre Huyghe, Lars Laumann, Inigo Manglaro-Ovalle, Caitlin Masley, Ursula Mayer, Anna Molska, Sadie Murdoch, Pia Rönicke, Caspar Stracke, and Judi Werthein
Curator:  Hajnalka Somogyi
Amidst a recent boom of exhibitions and projects positioned at the intersection of visual arts and modernist architecture, Gets Under the Skin tries to understand why this built heritage of the recent past became such an important point of reference for contemporary artists. On view will be a broad selection of video and film works of the last 10 years, by artists in Europe and North America whose works reflect modernist architectural legacies rooted in these continents. By way of live conversations featuring source texts and other related cultural matter, the works will be analyzed, criticized, contextualized, and contrasted. How can one make out in these works the entwined threads of fascination and criticality? How do artists take up the beauty of modernist design and the utopia in early 20th century social programs?

For additional information, call 845.758.7598, e-mail [email protected], or visit www.bard.edu/ccs.

This event was last updated on 04-07-2009

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