Rising and Sinking Again at the Hessel Museum of Art Reflects on the Contemporary as a Reckoning with the Past

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY—On view April 1 through May 28, 2023 at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, Rising and Sinking Again debuts 16 curatorial projects that examine the transmission of personal and collective histories, cultural knowledge, and identity in the practices of over 60 artists. Distinct in theme and focus, each exhibition is independently curated by a member of CCS Bard’s graduating class and culminates in rigorous, multi-year research and collaborations with artists, writers, scholars, and other contributors.

Anchored in critic and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina’s reflections on the meaning of the ‘contemporary,’ Rising and Sinking Again brings into focus the recursive nature of the present as being shaped by and responding to the after-effects of what came before. Featuring a diversity of media, the exhibitions range from explorations into the inheritance and reinforcement of marginalized identities in pop culture; cultural practices that are passed down or interrupted; to the uncovering of past secrets toward a more equitable future.

“The students’ shared method of confronting timely issues by examining their layers of historical sediment exemplifies the mission of CCS Bard as an incubator of critical thinking and creative action,” said Lauren Cornell, Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum of Art and Director of the Graduate Program at CCS Bard. “The sensitive research and invigorating perspectives expressed in Rising and Sinking Again gives insight into key artistic practices and social issues.”

The graduate exhibition is a core component of CCS Bard’s master’s program, which grants each graduating student the opportunity to conduct original research into emerging artists’ practices and to engage with CCS Bard’s extensive archives and the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Past student-curated exhibitions have served as springboards for artists in the earliest stages of their careers, deep scholarship into historic movements and tendencies, and as the basis for ongoing curatorial investigations by CCS Bard graduates at other leading museums, galleries, and arts organizations around the world.

CCS Bard Graduate Students Curatorial Statements
The 16 exhibitions that comprise Rising and Sinking Again are organized by CCS Bard’s graduating class of 2023: Katherine C. M. Adams, Zehra Begüm Kışla, Marina Caron, María Carri, Liv Cuniberti, Leo Cocar, Rachel Horvath-Eboh, Mary Kathryn Fellios, Jiwon Geum, Abel González Fernández, Kyle Herrington, Claire Kim, Sidney Pettice, Ursula Pokorny, Olivia Rodrigues, and Calvin Wang.Exhibition descriptions follow below in alphabetical order by curator’s last name.

Full curatorial statements are linked in the exhibition titles.

Boundary Monuments Dissolve
Featured artists: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Jia-Jen Lin, Christopher Meerdo, Naomi Nakazato, and Amina Ross
Curated by Katherine C. M. Adams
Boundary Monuments Dissolve features artists who employ digital-imaging techniques to unearth aesthetic and political turbulence within contested terrains. Registering seemingly immaterial forces across boundaries, the exhibition brings together new work by the duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme and recent artworks by Jia-Jen Lin, Christopher Meerdo, Naomi Nakazato, and Amina Ross.

Extended Structures
Featured projects: Silent University and unitednationsplaza
Curated by Zehra Begüm Kışla
Extended Structures surveys the work of Silent University (SU), initiated by artist Ahmet Öğüt, and unitednationsplaza, founded by artist Anton Vidokle, through a presentation of documentary and archival materials. By pairing these two distinct education projects, the exhibition intends to frame the method of “instituent practices,” or practices that seek to confront institutions not through sharp opposition but rather through the logic of extension and negotiation.

Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass
Featured artist: Bettina Grossman
Curated by Marina Caron
From 1977 to 1984, artist Bettina Grossman—who went by her first name only—documented the flow of pedestrians on New York’s 23rd Street. She shot over 8,000 35mm color slides from her apartment balcony at the Chelsea Hotel, categorizing the images as “deliveries,” “joggers,” “umbrellas,” and more. Her series, The Fifth Point of the Compass, New York from A to Z, studies in random constant, demographics of 23rd street, is comprised of nearly 1,100 slides. Presented for the first time in its entirety, the series forms the exhibition’s centerpiece and is shown alongside related works and archival material.

Silät
Featured artists: Thañí weavers, Andrei Fernández, and Demóstenes Toribio García
Curated by María Carri
Silät presents a selection of new textiles produced by Thañi—an organization of Indigenous women weavers of the Wichí people from the communities of Santa Victoria Este, in the province of Salta, in Argentina. Standing as a form of collective memory, Thañí’s work emphasizes the inextricable connection between Wichís and their surrounding world and highlights how this worldview frames their sovereignty and their historical claims for their territory. The exhibition is accompanied by the first publication dedicated to the Thañí’s weavers featuring texts in various
dialects of the Wichí language with Spanish and English translations.

An Anathema Strikes the Flesh of the Laborer
Featured artist: Harry Gould Harvey IV
Curated by Leo Cocar
This solo exhibition of Harry Gould Harvey IV takes up the industrial history of Harvey’s hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts, as well as his personal spiritual leanings through a presentation of multimedia sculptures and an accompanying publication. An Anathema Strikes the Flesh of the Laborer also presents a social and historical account of Fall River, routed through archival material and ephemera, using the city to think through a larger neglected history of Christian theology and leftist politics in dialogue with Harvey’s work.

Sarah Rapson
Featured artist: Sarah Rapson
Curated by Liv Cuniberti
This solo exhibition of Sarah Rapson focuses on the artist’s video works as a way to consider the many facets of Rapson’s multidisciplinary practice, which incorporates painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, works on paper, audio, and video.

Open Secret
Featured artists: Nina Valerie Kolowratnik and Hương Ngô
Curated by Rachel Horvath-Eboh
Open Secret exhibits the research-driven work of artist Hương Ngô and architect Nina Valerie Kolowratnik and explores theirinvestigations into secrecy as a tool to advocate for more equitable distributions of power. Collectively, the works reveal how an effective secret is not necessarily fully hidden.

Shapeshifting: Or, Synonyms for Skin
Featured artists: Anna-Sophie Berger, Nicola Costantino, Hannah Levy, Karinne Smith, and Rosemarie Trockel
Curated by Mary Kathryn Fellios
Shapeshifting: Or, Synonyms for Skin is a group exhibition that engages the deep politics of superficial play through motifs of self-adornment, looking specifically at the socialization of meaning that occurs at the physical meeting of clothing and its carrier. Processes and products of ornamentation take on, in the featured artists’ bodies of work, skins of their own.

Right to Mother
Featured artists: 업체eobchae, Kyuri Jeon, Hyojae Kim, and TZUSOO
Curated by Jiwon Geum
To what degree do women and nonbinary people have control over their bodies and their futures? This question takes on a particular inflection in South Korea, a nation whose government has made combating declining birthrates a national priority. Right to Mother features digitally inflected imaginations by three artists and one collective that expand and challenge traditional ideas around reproduction and birth.

Ya nada es como antes
Featured artists: Kevin Ávila, Bad Bunny, Liz Cohen, David Cordero, Luis Gispert, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, and Joiri Minaya
Curated by Abel González Fernández
The works in Ya nada es como antes (Nothing is as it used to be) explores depictions of the Latinx experience through hypercommodified symbols like cars, the sexualized body, and adornment such as jewelry. Revolving around the figure of reggaeton star Bad Bunny, the exhibition illuminates the complex interchanges between artistic practice and pop culture in a postcolonial context.

Meet Me in the Middle of Nowhere
Featured artists: Tom Burr, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jordan Ramsey Ismaiel, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Keioui Keijaun Thomas
Curated by Kyle Herrington
Meet Me in the Middle of Nowhere foregrounds the concept of “nowhere” as spaces of queer refuge and world-building. In presenting artworks that interpret, engage, and construct these sites, this exhibition situates “nowhere” as a conduit for poignant explorations of queer possibility and futurity.

Memory Work
Featured artists and poets: Natalie Diaz, Jasmine Gibson, Laurie Kang, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Esteban Ramón Pérez, and Jennif(f)er Tamayo
Curated by Claire Kim
Focusing on labor practices that are passed down between generations, Memory Work explores the ways that artists call on familial materials to forge connections with ancestral memory, land, and work. The exhibition features works by Laurie Kang, Jeneen Frei Njootli, and Esteban Ramón Pérez, shown alongside poetry by Natalie Diaz, Jasmine Gibson, and Jennif(f)er Tamayo.

Gorgeous, Thrilling, Spectacle
Featured artists: LaKela Brown, Ayanna Nayo, and Polo Silk
Curated by Sidney Pettice
Gorgeous, Thrilling, Spectacle analyzes the ways in which Black self-expression is deeply connected to aspects of care, glamor, camp, congregation, and resistance to surveillance. The exhibition addresses these dynamic relationships through the act of adornment and ornamentation, highlighting the ways that the practice of decorating one’s space and body is done with profound intention, borne out of an awareness of the spectral gaze that the Black body is subject to within public space.

Fuga
Featured artists: Carmen Barradas, Roma Cortina, Proyecto Deatres, Lucas Scandinavia, Gabriel Sierra, Probject (Manuel Raeder, Rodolfo Samperio), and Joaquín Torres-García
Curated by Ursula Pokorny
Some 20th-century artist homes and studios that have opened to the public hold a tension between preserving the historical space and presenting the daily life once lived there, in all its peculiarity. Fuga explores how the experience of such spaces can be translated into an exhibition by bringing together diverse contributions from Latin American artists, designers, and educators such as Carmen Barradas, Gabriel Sierra, Probject (Manuel Raeder, Rodolfo Samperio), Proyecto Deatres, and Joaquín Torres-García.

No Jokes Allowed
Featured artists: Alex Forrest, Rachel Harrison, Tala Madani, Lisi Raskin, Elaine Sturtevant, Alex Tatarsky, Ikechukwu Ufomadu,and Ry Rocklen
Curated by Olivia Rodrigues
No Jokes Allowed examines humorlessness and uncanny comedy as a tactic in art across sculpture, painting, and performance. Featuring works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection by Rachel Harrison, Tala Madani, Lisi Raskin, Elaine Sturtevant, and Ry Rocklen alongside performance by Ikechukwu Ufomadu, Alex Forrest, and Alex Tatarsky, the project calls attention to unsteady power relationships between institution, performer, and audience.

The Hoarder of Things
Featured artists: Yuji Agematsu, Nobutaka Aozaki, and Mimi Park
Curated by Calvin Wang
A can of corn purchased repeatedly, a stack of corresponding receipts, a map of smaller maps. A dirty Q-tip, a fishbone, the plastic wrapper from a pack of cigarettes. A button, a piece of string, a small robot. The Hoarder of Things investigates artistic practices that involve acts of collecting and accumulating quotidian materials.

Exhibition Credits
The student-curated exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard are part of the requirements for the master of arts degree and are made possible with support from Lonti Ebers; the Marieluise Hessel Foundation; the Enterprise Foundation; the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; the CCS Bard Exhibition Circle; and by the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends. Additional support is from the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard for select exhibitions.

About the Hessel Museum of Art
CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art advances experimentation and innovation in contemporary art through its dynamic exhibitions and programs. Located on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the Hessel organizes and presents group exhibitions and thematic surveys, monographic presentations, traveling exhibitions, as well as student-curated shows that are free and open to the public. The museum’s program draws inspiration from its unparalleled collection of contemporary art, which features the Marieluise Hessel Collection at its core and comprises more than 3,000 objects collected contemporaneously from the 1960s through the present day.

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading institution dedicated to curatorial studies, a field exploring the conditions that inform contemporary exhibition-making and artistic practice. Through its Graduate Program, Library and Archives, and the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard serves as an incubator for interdisciplinary practices, advances new and underrepresented perspectives in contemporary art, and cultivates a student body from diverse backgrounds in a broad effort to transform the curatorial field. CCS Bard’s dynamic and multifaceted program includes exhibitions, symposia, publications, and public events, which explore the critical potential of the practice of exhibition-making.

MEDIA CONTACTS:
Resnicow and Associates
Juliet Sorce / Chelsea Beroza / Emilia Litwak
Tel: +1 212-671-5158 / 212-671-5165 / 212-671-5168
Email: [email protected] / [email protected] / [email protected]

This event was last updated on 02-09-2023

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