The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) Presents the Spring Exhibitions and Projects

Chapter One: On view April 3 – April 24, 2016
Chapter Two: On view May 8 – May 29, 2016
Opening receptions on Sunday, April 3, 2016 from 1:00 – 4:00 p.m and Sunday, May 8, 2016 from 1:00 – 4:00 p.m       
 

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY, March 2016 – The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presents eighteen exhibitions and projects curated by second-year students in its graduate program in curatorial studies and contemporary art with seventeen individual exhibitions curated by each student, along with a student curated Marieluise Hessel Collection show.
 
The first of two series of exhibitions opens on Sunday, April 3, with a reception from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., and is on view through Sunday, April 24. The exhibitions are: A Group of Fish and Other Schools, organized by Benjamin Austin; Doll’s Eyes and Dimetrodon Tears, curated by Linden Baierl; Emphasis Repeats*, curated by Staci Bu Shea; Standard Forms, curated by Christian Camcho-Light; and Night Thoughts, curated by Jody Graf; A Path of Safe Travel, organized by Emma James; Timely Illuminations, curated by Yanhan Peng; The future will never arrive, organized by Rachael Rakes; and objects are slow events, curated by Alexis Wilkinson.
 
The second series of exhibitions and projects opens on Sunday, May 8, with a reception from 1:00–4:00 p.m., and is on view through Sunday, May 29. The exhibitions are: Mother Iode, curated by Adriana Blidaru; We Are All Traitors, curated by Tim Gentles; Praising the surface, curated by Rosario Güiraldes; Third Nature, curated by Laura Herman; Spooky Action, curated by Patricia Margarita Hernandez; Abstract Sex*, curated by Dana Kopel; Overburden, curated by Humberto Moro; what is left of what has left, curated by Bhavisha Panchia. 
 
Additionally on view is Receipt of a Magical Agent, a student-curated exhibition with works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Receipt of a Magical Agent employs the structure of the fairy tale as a curatorial approach, drawing from the morphology devised by twentieth-century Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp. By utilizing Propp’s method, whereby each tale is divided into thirty-one essential functions, Receipt of a Magical Agent explores how narratives are woven across an exhibition, between artworks, and within the single work of art.  Some of the artists included in the exhibition are Vito Acconci, Janine Antoni, Richard Artschwager, Matthew Barney, Roger Brown, Sarah Charlesworth, Anne Chu Francesco Clemente, Moyra Davey, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, April Gornik, Kojo Griffin, Walter Hampel, Rachel Harrison, Mona Hatoum, Imi Knoebel, Louise Lawler, Allan McCollum, Tatsuo Miyajima, Bruce Nauman, Ernesto Neto, Blinky Palermo, Allen Ruppersberg, Kiki Smith, Rosemarie Trockel, and Nicola Tyson.
 
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 April 3^rd and May 8th openings. 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.
 
#  #  #
 
MEDIA CONTACTS:      
For further information, images or to arrange interviews, please contact:
Andy Cushman                                  
Blue Medium                                                             
Tel: +1 (212) 675-1800
E: [email protected]
 
BARD COLLEGE CONTACT:
Mark Primoff
Director of Communications
Tel: +1 845.758.7412      
Email: [email protected]                   
 
CCS BARD CONTACT:                                     
Ramona Rosenberg                                      
Director of External Affairs                                         
Tel: +1 (845) 758-7574                                               
Email: [email protected]
 
 
CCS BARD GRADUATE STUDENT CURATORIAL STATEMENTS:          
 
 

Chapter 1 : April 3 - 24, 2016

 
A Group of Fish and Other Schools
Organized by Benjamin Austin, and featuring an exhibition of works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection co-curated by Evelyn Donnelly and Dana Gentile
Artists: Benjamin Austin, Andy Warhol, and selected artists from the Marieluise Hessel Collection
“A Group of Fish and Other Schools produces a curatorial trajectory in three movements. The first is a little-known treatise on curating by Andy Warhol, via his 99-minute screen test Henry Geldzahler (1964). Throughout the film, the eponymous curator becomes increasingly agitated and uncomfortable as he fidgets and squirms, generating an atmosphere of unease around the figure of the curator and his appearance in an artwork.
 
The second element of the program is a work of art by the show’s organizer, Benjamin Austin, in which a Paul O’Neill baseball card has been autographed by the Director of the Graduate Program at CCS Bard who shares the same name as the Yankee outfielder. The faux pas of curating oneself into one’s own show is staged alongside the representation of another curator - Geldzahler - and like Warhol’s film, is titled after its subject.

The third movement consists of an exhibition within an exhibition curated by Evelyn Donnelly and Dana Gentile, two members of the team of art handlers currently working at the Marieluise Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Bard. The goal of the project is to provide the curators with as much autonomy as possible within the institutional parameters of the thesis show. By dispersing and recalibrating curatorial authorship, the gesture of insourcing a collection show mobilizes museum staff members as a mode of curatorial research into the collection.  The curatorial modality of commissioning an exhibition is offered as a counterpoint to the two other works of art included by once again reconfiguring the visibility of the curator and the curatorial.”
 
 
Doll’s Eyes and Dimetrodon Tears
Work by artists WhiteFeather Hunter and Jennifer Montgomery, with still life photography by Robert Mapplethorpe and Hiroshi Sugimoto, an animal automaton, and archival materials from the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery 
Curated by Linden Baierl
“Doll’s eyes refers to a test of brainstem functioning, which is also a clinical criterion of brain death in comatose human patients. The test is performed by rotating the head from one side to the other, while observing whether the eyes remain fixed in position or move reflexively in the opposite direction of the rotation.

As method and metaphor for how we comprehend the limits of human life, Doll’s Eyes and Dimetrodon Tears proposes a gentle stretching of life-death ontologies through a nexus of echoes between the animate and the inanimate, the human and the animal. The exhibition is devised as a texture of affect, kinship, and becoming, in which animal figures appear in place of the human—sometimes as themselves and sometimes as spectral, miniaturized, or arrested representations and traces. Human-animal substitutions, alongside instances of cellular and mechanical intermingling across distinctions of species, forge connections between pampered pets, microbial companion species, and animals facing imminent mass extinction.”
 

Emphasis Repeats*
Barbara Hammer, Andrea Geyer, Reina Gossett, and Alex Martinis Roe
Curated by Staci Bu Shea
“Whereas ordinary experiences of affinity often involve interests and desires that are difficult to articulate, or are presumed to not require explanation, Emphasis Repeats* draws upon Donna Haraway’s idea of “affinity politics,” as an optic into how and why we are guided toward certain figures. The exhibition traces how affinity operates affectively within interpersonal, theoretical, and institutional domains, in contexts of powers that might themselves be obfuscated.
 
Affinity is explored through the work of artists who consider the affirmative potential of revisiting and reorganizing the narratives through which we relate to others. Barbara Hammer examines the interior scenes of homes and correspondence in order to glean an understanding of poet Elizabeth Bishop’s love life. Andrea Geyer addresses the politics of time within cultural institutions by way of speech, movement, and orientation, as her video and texts explore how history is constructed and made present. Reina Gossett shares stories of daily resistance and care to consider the vital and radical potentiality of friendship. Springing from her correspondence with philosopher Luce Irigaray, Alex Martinis Roe maps a genealogy of feminist thought and practice through a series of encounters between women across generations.

The works of art included in Emphasis Repeats suggest how affinity exists within forms of repetition, reference, association and connection that exceed simple notions of identification and influence. In their work, these artists assume a share d tempora lity that bonds individuals from past and present, present and future through different modes of relationality. Such relational forms include, but are not limited to, siblingship and kinship, as well as affirmative modes of inheritance, transmission and reproduction.
 
The works in the exhibition are themselves material and textual traces of each artists’ larger projects and commitments, offering intimate glimpses into their practices. The exhibition itself is the result of the generative flow of emphasis on relationships, wherein they prove not only a portion of the process, but also a political futurity.”

* Emphasis Repeats borrows its title from a lyric sung by Andrea Geyer in Three Chants Modern (2013).
 

Standard Forms
Artists: VALIE EXPORT, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Julio César Morales, Robert Morris, Ulrike Müller, and Martha Rosler
Curated by Christian Camacho-Light
“The non-citizen (or one who finds their citizenship called into question) exists in the shadow of the contemporary nation-state. Constituting both the figure against which the citizen may be produced, and that which resists standard forms of governance, the non-citizen is the preemptive target of mechanisms of surveillance, coercion, and control. By deploying advanced biopolitical technologies—such as biometric databases and facial recognition software—the nation-state is increasingly adept at capturing, and thus disarming, unknown bodies. In order to avoid violence, the non-citizen must elude apprehension at the very moment they are most insistently called to appear.
 
The works shown in Standard Forms prioritize the abstract, the non-figurative, and the indexical over mimetic representation of the human body. In utilizing these formal strategies, the works mask, obscure, or leave the body out. While only a selection considers the non-citizen directly, each offers vital modes of seeing or thinking the figure as it is edged by predominant norms, systems, and standards. In presenting these works together, the exhibition offers a phenomenology of embodiment that rejects the violence of the scopic.
 
Shape and line figure largely in the works of Standard Forms, repurposing legacies of abstraction, minimalism, and conceptualism. Within the exhibition, such forms often come to stand in for, or point to the body. In place of a figure, we find a blank, a trace, an outline. Form emerges as a politics, which inhibits the standardization and ontological capture of the non-citizen by the nation-state. And yet, the body can be glimpsed between the lines and from the edges, though remaining inapprehensible and just out of frame. If the non-citizen is signified beyond the fingerprint or the face, what agency, what forms and shapes might emerge?”
 

Night Thoughts
Artists: Sadie Benning, William Blake & Edward Young, Win McCarthy, and Josef Strau
Curated by Jody Graf
“Night Thoughts coaxes a Romantic understanding of artistic voice out of the shadows of contemporary discourse while locating its critical potential in a metaphorical night, itself inherited from Romanticism. This is a night eternally verging on day, in which distinctions between interiority and exposure, passivity and productivity, scribe and author are dissolved, and the figures of the dreamer and critic circle each other, moving ever closer.

Romanticism inaugurated a lasting, if embattled, understanding of artistic subjectivity as a singular voice. This paradigm persists, though in practice more than theory, and despite the anti-humanist tendencies of much twentieth century thought. Night Thoughts speaks to and from this intellectual unraveling of artistic voice – from the dissonance between the experience of individuality (the voice in one’s head), the critical histories that challenge it, and the contemporary forces that, by posing it as commodity, usher it towards exchange.
 
Understood as condensations of voice made material, the included works reprise Romantic notions of artistic voice by drawing it out of the depths and inscribing it, at times quite literally, on the surface. A persistent use of first-person language – embedded within sculptures, posters, illuminated poems, and videos – provides a common medium through which these disparate artists perform artistic subjectivity as a problematic.
 
Taking inspiration from The Complaint: or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality – a proto-Romantic poem written by Edward Young in the 1740s and illustrated by William Blake half a century later – the exhibition proposes the night as a metaphor for the latent potential of Romantic voice today. Here, the poem serves as a historical cipher through which to approach works by contemporary artists Sadie Benning, Win McCarthy, and Josef Strau.
 
For the Romantics, the night served as a site from which poetic voice was produced via states of dreaming or sleeplessness. In light of recent imperatives towards constant activity and exposure, the night’s promise of withdrawal renders it newly significant – a final bastion of the interior self whose resistance is premised on the passivity of sleep. By reading these historical “nights” against each other, Night Thoughts gestures towards a liminal zone in which the production rather than abstention of voice might offer a mode of critical reflection. Here, artistic subjectivity is displaced even as it proclaims itself, its waking contours faded.”
 

A Path of Safe Travel
A Selection of Drawings by Sarah Oppenheimer
Curated by Emma James
“A Path of Safe Travel presents a selection of studies borrowed from the archive of Sarah Oppenheimer, whose research is positioned alongside historical and current developments in cognitive science and architecture. While these fields have long explored the complex relationship between the subject’s ’s individual cognition of space and the “actual space” one occupies, Oppenheimer’s practice folds these inquiries into a broader conversation concerning how the built environment is mechanized. Through this, Oppenheimer points to the coexistence and intersection of disparate spatial realities and subject positions, which work concurrently to both center and de-center the viewer.

Taking an empirical approach to research, Oppenheimer’s practice incorporates regular collaboration with specialists in technical fields outside the normal purview of the art world. As such, Oppenheimer’s systems operate at the edge of possibility, frequently culminating in the production or resolution of new developments in technology and engineering. The advancements in knowledge put forth in Oppenheimer’s work bear significance both for our contemporary conceptualization of the function of exhibitionary and institutional space, as well as for our understandings of spatial experience, ambulation, and interface relations more broadly.”
 

Timely Illuminations
Participants: Ren Shulin, Bei He Meng Group, and Fusion Group
Curated by Yanhan Peng
“Timely Illuminations examines the histories of the pioneering Chinese photography publication, Modern Photography (1984-1993), that provided a venue for artistic dialogues in China’s social and political contexts of the 1980s and early 1990s. Modern Photography emerged within an era of idealism that followed the end of China’s Cultural Revolution, providing a unique space for a generation of emerging artists working with forms of documentary and conceptual photography. The magazine’s editorial and artistic activities provided a public sphere for artists’ newfound freedoms of expression and experimentation with the photographic image.
 
The practices of North River Union (Shanghai) and the Fission Group (Beijing) emerged amidst critical social transitions in the 1980s, focusing on urban imagery and exploring photographic languages drawn from contemporary art and photography from the West. Ren Shulin’s ten-year documentation of middle-school students are also included in this exhibition: although these photographs were never shown during the 1980s, since their discovery twenty years later, they have since elicited nostalgia for that period, and provide an important context for photographic work of the 1980s and more recent responses to it. This exhibition concludes in 1993, upon the restructuring of Modern Photography, and the emergence of underground publications in 1996. After this period,China’s New Photo movement would come to situate its ideals and aesthetic values in a more international environment.”
 

The future will never arrive
Artists: Luis López Carrasco, Beate Gütschow, Lisi Raskin, and Sarada Rauch
Organized by Rachael Rakes
“We seem to live in proto-end times, in which the future is apprehended and transmitted in pessimistic rather than hopeful terms. In the wake of the twentieth century’s continuous human catastrophes of war, ongoing economic crisis, and environmental devastation, the experience of the twenty-first century has been conditioned by the recurring knowledge of imminent disaster. Neither the monuments that were previously created to caution societies against repeating the past nor today’s frequent warnings of future decline have had significant effect on historical-cultural currents of repetition and despair.
 
Might reassessing conceptions of time and the present help shift the sense of inevitable, cyclical destruction?  The future will never arrive brings together works of art that collect elements of time and history to imagine such fragments as emergent possibilities, thereby extending their life, even as the present unfolds. Through strategies of temporal disjuncture, capture, recomposition, and reenactment, they demonstrate how the image and the object can trigger historical presence. These artists consider how the subject can carry history, how timeless monuments can be made of everyday objects, and how dominant modes of recollection short-circuit presence and future change. The exhibition further positions the image as a conduit of time-travel that has the power to reform our experience and consideration of the present.” 
 

objects are slow events
Artists: Maggie Bennett, Simone Forti, Jonah Groeneboer, and Katherine Hubbard
Curated by Alexis Wilkinson
“objects are slow events brings together a group of artworks that mark the ways in which time and movement are embedded in things that appear still. Works by Maggie Bennett, Simone Forti, Jonah Groeneboer, and Katherine Hubbard draw attention to the microscopic movements and glacial shifts that work against what might be perceived as a static art object. By employing time as material, various rhythms emerge, ranging from the cyclical, to the corporeal, the organic, and the geologic. As such, the exhibition reconsiders stillness as a movement register as opposed to an absence of motion.
 
Through subtle shifts in material and organic matter, works by Maggie Bennett and Simone Forti demonstrate how objects perform, complicating distinctions between material, object, and dancing subject. The process and subjectivity of vision are highlighted in Jonah Groeneboer’s abstract sculptures and in Katherine Hubbard’s photographs. These works undo forms of fixity in different media, and, in turn, mobilize and mark the viewing body’s relationship to the object. By drawing attention to processes of movement and perception, the works in objects are slow events position the art object as a participating force within an active and reciprocal encounter, and across their various registers of movement, assert stillness as a performative phenomenon.”
 
 
 

Chapter 2 : May 8 - 29, 2016

 
Mother lode
Artists: Jenny Holzer, Porpentine & Neotenomie, Hayley Silverman, and Slavs and Tatars
Curated by Adriana Blidaru 
“The term Mother lode comes from the vocabulary of American mining. Originating from the discipline of geology, it means ‘an abundant source’ and refers to a vein-like deposit of precious metal that is situated between the layers of an ore. This rock is mined and further processed in order to obtain valuable minerals. 

The exhibition takes its start from this geological concept in order to consider the sedimentation of language as a kind of mother lode, in how language is extracted, used, mediated, and is itself situated between interacting layers of time, space and human relationships.
 
The common playground of language is what brings these four artists in the exhibition together. Slavs and Tatars, Hayley Silverman, Porpentine and Neotenomie, and Jenny Holzer, all work on breaking the patterns of how communication is used, received, and how it is visually organized. Their practices disrupt its standard forms of logic, linearity and correlation between words and things.
 
The collective Slavs and Tatars conducts research-based projects, which reflect on how language is translated and how it evolves, especially in relation to the politics, history and popular culture of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe.
 
The artist Hayley Silverman performances weave inter-faith, interspecies, multi -layered modes of being, in order to provide a space in which one can contemplate and re-imagine powerful vectors of cultural transmission. Her practice seeks to expand, refashion, and exorcise pre-existing fables of self- hood. 
 
The game developers and writers Porpentine and Neotenomie design interactive storytelling platforms that allow players to construct their own narrative by steering their experience through nodes of hypertext.
 
The artist Jenny Holzer depicts, discloses, and subverts the existing politics of language’s discursive structures. 
 
Mother lode releases language from its fossilized condition by breaking apart how it makes sense or represents the world. The goal is to favor its use as an indeterminate and open-ended device, with which one could find a new potential for restructuring knowledge.”
 

We Are All Traitors
Artists: Bunny Rogers and Cosima von Bonin
Curated by Tim Gentles
 

We express ourselves with the hope of perfect communication. I think this is rare and maybe impossible. We make the compromise that externalization is inherently a betrayal of the self, because connecting to our environment is most important. The sensation of security is most important. This is a nice aspect of socialization, that we all enter the ring as traitors.
 
–Bunny Rogers, "We Are All Traitors: Interview with Harry Burke" Mousse 44 (June 2014)

“We Are All Traitors presents the work of American artist Bunny Rogers and German artist Cosima von Bonin, exploring questions of artistic subjectivity and persona. For both, the artistic subject is something that is necessarily articulated through a social field or a network of relations constituted by artists, dealers, collectors and fans, communities of friendship, and shared mass and subcultural experiences.
 
In their work, the selves presented are assembled from disparate parts, constructed via dense networks of social and cultural references, autobiography, and self-mythologization. These complex assemblages are characterized by a persistent tension: seemingly structured according to their own internal logics, they are nonetheless fundamentally malleable and dispersed, constantly absorbing new material from outside of themselves.
 
In von Bonin's work, the self functions as a kind of node, constantly deferred through collaboration and other obfuscations of artistic agency. Rogers' work, on the other hand, presents the artistic subject as an avatar, painstakingly assembled and, as such, mutable and immaterial at its core.
 
The exhibition thus seeks to draw a line of continuity between two distinct artistic tendencies: contemporary practices that are explicitly imbricated in a logic of social media networks, necessitating a highly stylized performance of the self, and earlier theories and practices emerging in the 1990s around what is colloquially knows as the ‘Cologne school’ and which consider the role of the artistic subject in networked capitalism. For both Rogers and von Bonin, the artistic subject is something that must be constructed rather than simply asserted, a process that is neither heroic nor innocent.”
 
Praising the surface
Artists: Oliver Laric, Amalia Pica, Alan Segal, and Juan Tessi
Curated by Rosario Güiraldes
“We live in a world increasingly mediated through images and screens that make the abstract concrete and visible. In the mid-eighties, Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser signaled a shift that has now become ever present, threatening a displacement of labor into immateriality and an increasing structuring of social interactions through mechanisms of quantification. One of the symptoms within which this shift has occurred is the ubiquitous flood of composite, automated, and digitally animated technical images. Praising the surface suggests that technical images are not necessarily detached. Rather, they are cognizant of their circumstances of production: they reveal that there isn’t a clear separation between the technical and the social and that their processes are inflected by a user who programs these tasks. In an attempt to understand how to better be aware of the world and of ourselves, Praising the surface is set to measure the blurred boundaries between automated and human labor.
 
Praising the surface presents works by Oliver Laric, Amalia Pica, Alan Segal, and Juan Tessi. Their works capture, decode, and reveal the inextricability between labor and the systems and mechanisms that structure their making processes. These works detail and unfold the willful interventions that guide their construction, demystifying a conception of the technical image as merely immaterial data. As these works make available the users’ editing, play, manipulation or composition, they give clarity to the micro-units of transformation within which subjectivity exists – subjectivity that is often rendered opaque by the mystifications conjured by our technologies.”
 
Third Nature
Artists: Nina Canell, Marjolijn Dijkman, Femke Herregraven, Basim Magdy, and Suzanne Treister
Curated by Laura Herman  
“The question of how we live depends on what lies in-between us. Infrastructure is the given answer to the question of how worlds are constituted. It is a promise of movement and relation, its actual materiality producing unguaranteed effects. Infrastructure organizes matter and people, it embodies breakdown and repair; it short-circuits and disseminates, it divides worlds while granting access to other ones. Even as the original military connotations of infrastructure remain, infrastructure today has expanded to encompass all forms of governance, from organizational systems to communication networks and global economics, in addition to soft forms of infrastructure like protocols, rules, contracts and international standards. 
 
If art grappling with infrastructure typically favors diagrams, maps and data visualization, the work in this exhibition does not show infrastructure, but rather how it feels to function in a world governed by the infrastructural. According to theorist McKenzie Wark, “Our imaginings of what is at stake in the transformation of the space of the globe by third nature are still only that: imaginings.” This third nature is explored through works by Marjolijn Dijkman, Suzanne Treister, Basim Magdy, Nina Canell, and Femke Herregraven. The works brought together in this exhibition challenge how infrastructure is more commonly depicted through representational regimes. Instead, these works suggest post-cartographic attempts at navigating infrastructure’s affects and effects, placing more reliance on divination, imagination and speculation. The works incorporate fictional lava landscapes and trading algorithms, psychoactive plants and multinational corporations, rubber gutta-percha blocks and information networks, binaural beats and the returning specters of past technologies. Spanning different temporalities, geographies and epistemologies, Third Nature brings together disparate and multiple responses to an infrastructure-driven world, with malleable possible outcomes.”
 
Spooky Action
Charles Atlas in collaboration with Philippe Decoufle, Gunther Forg, Jutta Keother, Mark Leckey, Laurie Simmons, and Rosemarie Trockel
Curated by Patricia Margarita Hernandez
“Albert Einstein describes locality as the idea that an object is directly influenced only by its immediate surroundings. Rejecting the notion that outlying objects could instantaneously affect each other, Einstein acknowledged that quantum theory necessitated “spooky action at a distance” but refused to accept that the universe could behave in such a strange and apparently random fashion. 
 
The curatorial act necessitates assembling objects in immediate surroundings with other objects. Though not always defined by this function, curating involves the creation of dynamic connections between things. An exhibition allows for a constellation of 
materials, histories, and information to enter into a situation of possible instantaneous connection. In other words, the space of exhibition is a location where spooky action might occur between objects.
 
Spooky Action brings together a group of works that, in various conflicting ways suggest modes of instantaneous relation. They are brought together in this exhibition under the hope, as suggested by the title, that the space of curating might open up these 
unexpected interactions and strange proximities that the universe shouldn’t allow.”
 
Abstract Sex*
Artists: Juliette Bonneviot, Jesse Darling, Dorota Gaweda & Egle Kulbokaite, and Marian Tubbs
Curated by Dana Kopel
“Sex today demands reconceptualization. Not simply a relational act between humans or animals, nor exclusively a set of performative or discursive practices, sex manifests as a matrix of diffuse processes encoded in material, molecular, digital and biochemical formations. Abstract Sex* imagines a post-sex adequate to a radically expanded conception of what it is to be human: a technologically and biopolitically produced agglomeration of symbiotic organisms beneath the increasingly tenuous veneer of a coherent body or self.
 
Necessarily, sex will mutate, reshape itself. New forms of sex emerge at sites of mutual transfer and fields of viral exchange and contamination, whether biological or digital. Following Luciana Parisi, the exhibition insists on an abstract sex that occurs between porous bodies—at once virtual and tangible, inorganic and alive. The body is the site where bacteria intersect with larger socio-cultural and economic systems. Sex is the event in which these macro- and microscopic systems transmit, transform and reproduce.
 
Abstract Sex* relies on queer theory’s expansion of the idea of sex as practice and system of signification, acknowledging yet moving beyond the coding of certain materials, forms, and bodies as feminine. Abstract Sex* treats gender and desire as political abstractions. Accordingly, Abstract Sex* foregoes the literal representations of sex organ and copulation imagery that were once viable revolts against the repression and heteronormalization of sex. If sex in the biopolitical regime was constituted as a site of both regulatory and emancipatory power, Abstract Sex* recognizes that visibility, as a strategy of sexual liberation, is now easily absorbed in the service of technocapitalism.
 
Works by Juliette Bonneviot, Jesse Darling, Dorota Gaweda & Egle Kulbokaite, and Marian Tubbs constitute preliminary attempts to articulate sex as a de-individuated force embedded in abstract processes of circulation, transmission, and replication—processes that reproduce, but might also be used against, the biotechnical power that generates and controls contemporary life.”
 
*after Luciana Parisi
 
Overburden
Artists: Faivovich & Goldberg, Mario García Torres, Cynthia Gutierrez, Fritzia Irízar, Gonzalo Lebrija, Jorge Méndez Blake, Gabriel Orozco, R. H. Quaytman, Danh Vo, and Andrea Zittel  
Curated by Humberto Moro
“Overburden not only means the state of bearing more than one can handle, but also refers to the earth’s sub-strata, which contains decades of materials that have slowly gathered and compressed beneath the soil. In such compression these materials move slowly but when excavated and accelerated, they transformed into something  else.  As buildings, or  even monuments, they create a milieu for social and politic interactions.  
 
The works in this exhibition behave similarly.  Here, what happens within artworks  is as critical as that which seemingly happens outside them. Overburden investigates the use of resources such as excavations of historical and literary sources as tools to unravel cultural value. Through the use of abstraction, texture, stillness, displacements, artists work at the interstices and paradoxes of institutional realms.
 
Resonances and movements between artworks and larger scenarios are subduing at discontinuous velocities.  They constantly negotiate between what’s static in their appearance and what is mobilizing beneath. Thus, the legal, social, political or economical circumstances   on   the   works   are rhizomatically interconnected with   more   personal narratives.  
 
The artists gathered share an interest in confronting pre-established social  concepts,  to prove   the  tension   points   between   public   and  private   interests.   Linear   histories   are insufficient to these artists, which contest and destabilize  the logic  of progress.  Instead, there remains a desire to return, reinterpret and understand in new ways the conjunctures they revisit. These artists desire alternate destinies, and reimagine history as something constantly in flux; in doing so, they measure their remaining agency and test their capacity and place within a civic sphere.”  
 
 what is left of what has left
Contributors: John Akomfrah and Trevor Mathison, DJ/rupture, Tony Cokes, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Lamin Fofana, and Val Jeanty
Produced by Bhavisha Panchia
“what is left of what has left takes the form of a 12-inch vinyl record album comprised of works by artists, DJs and musicians. Constituting a meeting place of voices, ideas and propositions, the record brings together works that bear witness to various modalities of black sonic and cultural formations from within the contemporary African diaspora. The record draws upon rapidly evolving sonic lineages to explore the rupture and mutation of sound and music over time and space-- through histories of migration and displacement, as well as through the use of vocoders, samplers, synthesizers and music software applications. what is left of what has left foregrounds the influence of sound on the production and shaping of social and cultural identities of African diasporas, demonstrating how the sonic comes to figure a sense of place and belonging, and our relationship with both past and present.
 
Here the record is employed as a vessel for contemporary narratives, echoing Paul Gilroy’s use of the chronotope to denote the image of the ship moving across the black Atlantic. In this way, the record can be thought of as a spatio­temporal matrix, “a micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” by which different artistic and cultural practitioners converge. Works by John Akomfrah and Trevor Mathison, Tony Cokes, DJ/rupture, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Lamin Fofana, and Val Jeanty address cultural dislocations, migrations and transnational flows through sonic and musical experimentation marked by reverb, delay, subtraction, digital sampling and modulation. These polyphonic and hybrid fragments reveal the complexity of subjectivities constructed by global social, economic and cultural exchanges.”

This event was last updated on 03-28-2016

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