The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College Presents Moves & Countermoves

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY, March 2014 – The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presents eleven exhibitions and projects curated by second-year students in its graduate program in curatorial studies and contemporary art with ten individual exhibitions curated by each student, along with a student curated Marieluise Hessel Collection show.  Moves & Countermoves will be on view from March 29 - May 3, 2015, with the opening reception taking place on Sunday, March 29th from 1:00-4:00 p.m.
Moves & Countermoves explores exhibition-making as a game of establishing and breaking its own rules of engagement. Focusing on the relations between viewer, artwork, display, and institution, contemporary curatorial practice is interpreted here as a ‘slight of hand’ tactic serving to play out, and to confound competing values within the art world.

Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection are shuffled and reshuffled as curators and artists impose various selection criteria upon them. Moves & Countermoves draws from the collection to highlight a gameplay of exhibition–making strategies. Inside the museum and beyond its walls, artworks from divergent histories are placed in casual opposition to each other over a constructed platform, evoking a game board, populated with idiosyncratic pieces. Moves & Countermoves demonstrates how display affects visibility and cultural dissemination, altering the implicit rules determining what is seen and unseen within the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Some of the works chosen from the Marieluise Hessel Collection for Moves & Countermoves include pieces by Janine Antoni, Keith Edmier, Robert Gober, Rachel Harrison, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

The CCS Bard Class of 2015 thesis exhibitions parallel these explorations. Utilizing different selection criteria and display methods, the ten thesis exhibitions obliquely demonstrate curatorial gameplay and how it inherently shifts values within cultural economies. Enacting strategies of exhibition-making, some curatorial practices establish rules, while others reinvent them.

In Moves & Countermoves, the exhibitions investigate what it means to operate in a field that thrives upon the making and breaking of its own rules. Game, set, and match.

Student-curated exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; the CCS Bard Arts Council; and by the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.

The CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College are open Thursday through Sunday from 11:00a.m. to 6:00 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 from  New York City for the March 29 opening. Reservations are required; call +1 845-758-7598 or email [email protected].

About the Center for Curatorial Studies
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) was founded in 1990 as an exhibition and research center for the study of late twentieth-century and contemporary art and culture and to explore experimental approaches to the presentation of these topics and their impact on our world. Since 1994, the Center for Curatorial Studies and its graduate program have provided one of the world’s most forward thinking teaching and learning environments for the research and practice of contemporary art and curatorship. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty and researchers to question the critical and political dimension of art, its mediation and its social significance. CCS Bard cultivates innovative thinking, radical research and new ways to challenge our understanding of the social and civic values of the visual arts. CCS Bard provides an intensive educational program alongside its public events, exhibitions, and publications, which collectively explore the critical potential of the institutions and practices of exhibition-making. It is uniquely positioned within the larger Center’s tripartite resources, which include the internationally renowned CCS Bard Library and Archives and the Hessel Museum of Art, with its rich permanent collection.

 
General information on the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College can be found on its website at: www.bard.edu/ccs.

 

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MEDIA CONTACTS:

For further information, images or to arrange interviews, please contact:


BARD COLLEGE CONTACT:

Mark Primoff

Director of Communications

Tel: +1 845.758.7412      

Email: [email protected]                   

 

CCS BARD CONTACT:

Ramona Rosenberg

External Affairs Manager

Tel: +1 (845) 758-7574

Email: [email protected]

 

Moves & Countermoves

March 29 – May 3, 2015

Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Bard Galleries, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson

CCS BARD GRADUATE STUDENT CURATORIAL STATEMENTS:
Point of Contact
Artists: Gordon Hall, Martin Roth, Naama Tsabar, and Pedro Wirz
Curated by Xavi Acarin

Point of Contact sets a performative field that invites encounters between objects and bodies. Expanding from minimalist concerns with surface, scale, presence, and materiality, the works presented here introduce the visitor to unexpected rhythms of doing, thinking, and feeling. The objects are considered in their capacities to trigger events, revise models of engagement, and alter the conditions in which we live.  

Works by Gordon Hall, Martin Roth, Naama Tsabar, and Pedro Wirz, suggest coordinates and positions that summon uncustomary ways of acting. Inspired by both the rave party and the research lab, this exhibition studies variables with an ethos of exuberance. The exhibition as choreography unfolds an open process of associations and dissociations. The works function as elements in an assemblage, a succession of moments that search to amplify ecological and emotional parameters. The objects act as catalysts for research and for connectivity, not only provoking desires and memories, but evoking the work of the imagination and its capacity for action. The exhibition cultivates a ‘zone of proximity’ where people and things intimately encounter one another. Through proximity, an event is generated, going beyond the determined forms of the people and things in play. As event, the dynamic qualities of performativity overshadow static formations of the self. Small moments of indeterminacy are developed and act as test grounds, generating different ways of participating in and relating to the world through our actions.

On Sweat, Paper, and Porcelain
Artists: Heman Chong, Ho Rui An, The Propeller Group and Superflex, Andrew Norman Wilson and Akhil C, and Yee I-Lann
Sourced by Kathleen Ditzig
 
Facilitated by the liberalizing of world trade, the internationalization of production and commodity consumption, and developments in transport and communications, offshoring has allowed nomadic capitalists, itinerant individuals, contemporary artists and cultural producers to scour the globe for resources and new markets, opening the world through displacing labor and circulating capital.

 

On Sweat, Paper, and Porcelain presents works by Heman Chong, Ho Rui An, The Propeller Group and Superflex, Andrew Norman Wilson and Akhil C, and Yee I-Lann: their work leverages global infrastructures of offshoring, to produce art situated in exchange. Focusing our attention on personal experiences of complex global processes, a landscape of calling cards, the sweaty back of anthropologist Charles le Roux, blue and white ceramic plates depicting a workforce, an encounter with a Fed-ex employee, a Vietnamese soap based on a shipment of porcelain commissioned as part of an artist residency and a long-distance relationship between an artist and a personal assistant demystify the global as an expansive, open world. This art–made through the very infrastructures of an internationalised art world—measures the densities and histories of the global in the span of a calling card, the lengths of internet orders and the intimate space between you and me.

On Sweat, Paper, and Porcelain is part of  offshoreart.co  a research project that examines the offshore to understand global infrastructures and their supporting narratives.

Romancing The Fragment

Artists: Cayetano Ferrer and Avery K. Singer presented with works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection

Curated by Amber J. Esseiva

Romancing The Fragment presents works that are invested in materialist histories, reconstructing our vernacular visual languages in various forms, freezing its fragments and revealing our contemporary culture in ruin. This exhibition explores our relationship to history and contemporary technological mapping as seen through works of art that are demonstrative of a society’s navigation through a fragmented condition.

Cayetano Ferrer, Avery K. Singer together with works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection take as their medium the debris of mass culture to address the urgent question: what are we to do with reconstruction in a time where history and all it’s material ephemera have been subjected to extreme fragmentation?

Romancing The Fragment re-invests in the fragmented conditions attributed to postmodernism, taking seriously issues that we still contend with that have not stopped mattering, as they inform our relationship to time and history. By embracing our fragmented condition these artists rely on digital and online search functions in order to situate the notion of these functions as crucial and sometimes-flawed aspects of the archive. Romancing The Fragment presents artists’ that assemble material as composite, through a material determinism that is dedicated to meticulous material reading and reconstruction.

I’ll be your interface.*
Artists: Dexter Sinister
Organized by Roxana Fabius

I’ll be your interface.* is a two-phase project conducted in conjunction with Dexter Sinister that questions the neutrality of computer interfaces as depoliticized spaces by asserting that software demands and generates its own ideologies, politics, and behaviors.

PHASE 1 (COMMISSION): in New York City, a data visualization company will commission Dexter Sinister for design consulting services over a four-month period. Research will address issues of information bubbling, identity profiling, and discrimination that result from efficiency-oriented thinking. The goal is to collaborate in the development of visual interface proposals that manage and represent data according to other, less directly instrumental criteria.

PHASE 2 (EXHIBITION): in CCS Bard at the Hessel Museum, an exhibition of previous works by Dexter Sinister will be presented. Together with supporting material drawn from the Marieluise Hessel Collection and the Special Collections Archives, this exhibition will address similar problems of information mediation and distribution.

These two phases run in parallel, meeting at different points, feeding off, and informing each other. In both the design commission and the art exhibition, work shares two related qualities:

a. the goal is to transmit information

b. this is done by aesthetic means

The key difference lies in intent: some work towards a functional purpose, while others work to an aesthetic purpose. Some appear to be functional, but are actually aesthetic, and vice versa. But what if we blur these differences? What if we establish a space in which the functional and the aesthetic stand on equal footing?

This project presents objects with different purposes asking: how can the aesthetic and the functional--as exemplified through the exhibition and interface--serve to disclose and modify patterns of information transmission within the data deluge we live in today?

Cloud Cover

Artists: Liam Gillick, George Inness, Marina Pinsky, and Rachel Rose
Curated by Lee Foley

How do we read the sky today?

Cloud Cover investigates how media shapes the way we comprehend our physical surroundings. Increasingly, we rely on flows of information filtered through screens to make decisions, interact with one another, and view the world. The contemporary screen is a communication device and a material surface, an interface that invites different modes of reading and looking. We constantly look at and through these interfaces to situate ourselves in space. This exhibition considers the materiality of digital and non-digital screens, as well as their historical precursors. By engaging the screen as a structure among other structures, the artists explore the mediating processes that occur both within and beyond the frame.

Liam Gillick, Marina Pinsky, and Rachel Rose explore the ways we take in, respond to, and present information by relating current modes of communication to the history of architecture, film, photography, and painting. A 19th century landscape painting by George Inness challenges the tendency to compare screens to transparent windows. The artists advocate for the space to critically apprehend complex relationships between inside and outside, normative states and disaster, destruction and construction, human and non-human.

The works in Cloud Cover examine spaces designed for contemplation and discourse, such as the studio, the gallery space, and the glass house. Events unfold behind solid and translucent surfaces, such as screens and windows, allowing only partial or distracted views. Through layered imagery and composite forms, the works convey a feeling of estrangement while inviting the viewer into almost uncanny confrontations with the surrounding environment.

Signal from Noise
Artists: Sophia Brueckner, Lev Manovich / Software Studies Initiative, Nyeema Morgan, and Evan Roth
Curated by Elizabeth Larison

Mass distribution of information is no longer dependent on traditional gatekeepers; anyone with a will and wi-fi access can share content and ideas on any variety of platforms, allegedly performing democratic ideals through a profound decentralization of media power. Yet, as producers and consumers of information, individuals engaging with the web must contend with the contributions of bots, trolls, and spam; endless clickbait distractions; and algorithmic data tracking which panders to homophily and results in targeted advertising. All join in the sheer cacophony of other voices and perspectives, coalescing as a result of crowd-sourcing and casual over-participation. The digital agora is always with us.
In this screen-based world, ever more embedded in the real, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish signal from noise. Whether linking to ideations or inversions of truth, intelligibility, legibility, or desirability, these italicized terms are unstable in their application, and may vary significantly between users. This, compounded with ever-shortening cycles of expression and absorption, yields an increasingly obscured engagement.
Inspired by web-infused environments of the everyday, Signal from Noise presents ways in which  crowd-sourcing, aggregation, and filtering appear to stand in for more traditional processes of social participation and representation. Gesturing towards the political f/utility of this public forum, the exhibition features artworks derived from interfaces between user and screen.
Incorporate Me

Artists: The Bernadette Corporation, Maja Cule, Auto Italia (Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest, Andrew Kerton and Jess Wiesner), Mika Tajima, New Humans, and Artie Vierkant

Curated by Robin Lynch

My phone is promiscuous, and jealous. I fall asleep with it, and wake up to it, but it is constantly giving away my information to others, and tracking my movements. Yet, it is my gateway to my network, my life. As the general consensus seems to be, as long as I’m not doing anything wrong, I am safe. Right?

 A digital environment is a highly personalized and familiar experience, conditioned by our own interests and connections, but also by the platform interests which seek to maintain our attention. In this way a data portrait becomes not only the individual, but a conglomeration of other voices, relationships, people, and entities. This tension between hyper-individualism and continuous contact propels a necessity to self-examine, self-represent, self-market, and self-preserve, bringing about paranoid impulses to maximize yourself, and be the best possible you.

Incorporate Me brings together works that balance the anxieties and benefits of continuous connectivity within communications technology. Each work incorporates variations of the human presence to examine the double-edged status of the networked self through topics of ownership, data collection, intimacy, peer exchange economies, and technological conditioning.

A conversation overheard at a coffee shop, amongst the number of laptops and smartphones:

“do you follow?” And the answer, “actually, that’s my business.”

said the multi-million dollar data advertising CEO

said the curator following that artist whose work they’ve been obsessing over for months now

said your next employer, running your name through a search engine

CCK-4
Artists: Andreas Greiner, Armin Keplinger, Jacob Kirkegaard, and Markus Hoffmann
Curated by Park Myers

Do you feel faint?

Do you feel nauseous?

Are you fearful?

Do you feel shakiness, trembling, twitching?

Do you have heart palpitations?

Do you have a sense of unreality?

Do you have rapid or difficult breathing?

Do you feel detached from your body?

Do you feel dizzy or light headed?

Is it difficult for you to perform your task?

Do you feel confused?

Do you feel you might die?

Is it difficult to concentrate?

 
Is it difficult for you to speak?

 
In clinical studies of panic and anxiety, CCK-4 is an anxiogenic administered to induce momentary severe anxiety and panic in patients and test subjects. A common characteristic of extreme anxiety is the catastrophic misinterpretation of a given event. The momentary experience of time is pushed to extremes of speed and slowness, and spatial dimension and magnitude become difficult to comprehend. In this instance subjects become acutely aware of not only their own body and mind but also the environment in which they are embedded.

CCK-4 presents a set of contexts in which the visitor’s attention is directed towards the psychological and physiological processes that form the subjective perception of a given space and time. Works in the exhibition explore the inherent elasticity of human perception by heightening the viewer's awareness of external spatial and temporal aspects of the exhibition, and attunes us to the internal perceptive processes that organize our sense of time and space. In the exhibition’s entirety, CCK-4 curatorially considers how emotion, mental states, and sensorial stimulus form the complex ensemble of one’s extended experience of the present moment.


Twelve o’clock
Artists: Paul Chan, William Copley, Richard Hawkins, Matthew McCaslin, Dan Miller, David Shrigley, Kiki Smith, Xu Tan, Chen Tong, Lin Yilin, and Zhou Tao

Curated by Wang Jing

 

In 2011, the artist Chen Tong created “cantonbon” (meaning “Canton Gang, Canton Good”) by combining his two spaces Libreria Borges (1993-) and Libreria Borges Institut d’Art Contemporain (2007-). Through an assemblage of artworks, interviews and archives, Twelve o’clock introduces CANTONBON and Tong’s distinct model of institutional practice to New York, a different location and time-zone, where two specific local art contexts encounter each together so as to contest their globalized spatio-temporal frame.

 

Archival materials relate CANTONBON to the emergent role of Cantonese contemporary art during a period of increased internationalization of Contemporary Chinese art from the 1990s onwards. Interviews with Tong, Claire Montgomery (Director of Location One, New York) and art collector Marieluise Hessel indirectly draw CANTONBON into debates on cultural diversity, curatorial transparency and the contested terms of “alternative” art scenes, institutions and modes of practice across different geographical territories.


Selected artworks flesh out a representation of networked relationships between three  institutions’  practices.  The  exhibition  juxtaposes  twenty-four  ink  on  paper works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection with Tong’s Chinese ink paintings and video works together with additional artworks by Cantonese artists Xu Tan, Zhou Tao and Lin Yilin. During the opening, Tong will also realize a series of his “Chinese paintings”, the mode of artistic production he employs to financially support and sustain CANTONBON - the genre of paintings most capitalized upon by the Guangzhou traditional Chinese art market.

 
Adaptive Permanence

Artists: José León Cerrillo, Harun Farocki, and Daniel Keller with Ella Plevin

Curated by Natalia Zuluaga


Images are no longer held up to simply register the traces of lived experience. Instead, composite images, pixels, designs, and seemingly innocuous geometric forms behave more like language, symbols, and materials; replicating in an autopoietic process that permeates life systemically and at turbo speeds. These idea-images are the building blocks of how our world is constructed and when applied take different forms: from the immersive environment of video games, to the architectural imaging software at the heart of imagining new cities, to the systems used to coordinate the global movement of goods we consume, and the virtual, but real, nature of the financial markets today. In other words, they constitute the very basis for constructing our world, how we move through it, and subsequently how our subjectivities are pressured through these mechanisms. We are asked to constantly reframe our relationship with our own capacities and thresholds and adapt to the indeterminacy that they perpetuate.


Works in the exhibition by Jose León Cerrillo, Harun Farocki, and Daniel Keller with Ella Plevin decode the process by which these virtual forms actualize, and make the transformation from abstract to concrete visible and tangible. Adaptive Permanence proposes that in doing so, they convey the complexity of how our constructed world is structured, formulated and designed. This aesthetic gesture amounts to a pointing which may catalyze the need for a parallax shift—a pivot—in the way we view our capabilities within such seemingly impossible structures.

This event was last updated on 06-02-2015

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