The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
(CCS Bard) Presents The Filament and the Bulb: 2017 Spring Exhibitions and Projects 
 

 
On view April 9 – May 28, 2017
Opening reception on Sunday, April 9, 2017 from 1:00 – 4:00 p.m         
 
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY, April 2017 – The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presents 15 exhibitions and projects curated by second-year students in its graduate program in curatorial studies and contemporary art, with twelve individual exhibitions curated by each student, along with three exhibitions curated from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, the Bard College Collection, and the CCS Bard Library and Archives. The students have organized these exhibition and projects as part of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree. The exhibitions open on Sunday, April 9, with a reception from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., and are on view through Sunday, May 28.  
 
A conductive filament converts electricity to light within a lightbulb. The current flows through the filament, and is maintained by an inert gas within the bulb. While there is the trace of a spark, the filament’s sustained illumination relies upon its non-reactive environment. The combination of these two elements produces light, radiating outward.
 
Similarly, the exhibitions in The Filament and the Bulb arise from interactions between specific contexts or conditions that open onto wider narratives. Although the starting point of each circuit is discernible, the flow of electricity has effects beyond its point of origin and its enclosure. An exhibition may itself stem from a specific context, but still have the capacity to portray a multitude of stories. The interruption, reinterpretation or integration of neglected narratives are strategies to address dormant flickers within each preexisting current. Each exhibition in The Filament and the Bulb utilizes the stability of their environment as a platform for re-negotiating these seemingly simple circuits and their preconceived convictions.
 
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 9th 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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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 EXHIBITIONS:                             
 
When the whites of the eyes are red
Artists: Doa Aly, Ivana Bašic with text by Haytham el-Wardany
Curated by Shehab Awad
When the whites of the eyes are red is an exhibition about the fear of grappling with reality. Various elements in the exhibition inhabit the blurred lines between perceptions of sleep and death to lay bare the fragility of being and embrace the limits of knowledge.
 
The Written Language of Reality
Artists: Yto Barrada, Basim Magdy, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Akram Zaatari
Curated by Marta Cacciavillani
Taking its title from an essay written in 1966 by the Italian director, poet, and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Written Language of Reality grapples with questions of realism and actuality. The exhibition brings together a group of works that stage a complicated, broken relation between image, text, and script.
 
Figure 59
Curated by Pat Elifritz
Figure 59 is based on one painting by the artist and futurist, Magda Cordell McHale. By way of an individual work, this exhibition addresses the problem of locating Cordell within, and beyond, movements of postwar art, urbanism, and academia.
 
Whispers in the Grass: The Living Theatre and The Brig
Curated by Anna Gallagher-Ross
The exhibition Whispers in the Grass investigates the closure of the Living Theatre by the United States government in October 1963 that put an end to the experimental theatre company’s controversial performance, The Brig. Part research inquiry, part conspiracy theory, this exhibition assembles evidence in the form of original interviews, films by Jonas Mekas and Storm de Hirsch, archival materials from the Living Theatre’s records, police surveillance files, and a staged reading of transcripts from a criminal trial, read by Mike Iveson and Kaneza Schaal, to probe the story of artists and activists whose lives and art were haunted by Cold War-era surveillance—a story with lingering implications for our own surveilled time.
 
Other Articulations of the Real 
Artists: Torkwase Dyson, Cameron Rowland, Shawn Theodore, with a writing by Sable Elyse Smith
Curated by Stephanie Goodalle
Other Articulations of the Real features art that explores and interrogates racialized melancholy amongst Black Americans. Melancholy is not purely a psychoanalytical phenomenon, but a merged physical and mental state of being embedded within the environment.
 
Dark Clouds Silver Linings
Curated by Emer Grant
An exhibition that engages with our complex affinity to technological cultures, to speculate on their relationships to place, imagined and real. 
 
 
Lawrence Weiner: A Means of Avoiding Bureaucracy 
Curated by Lola Kramer
As the first presentation of the artist’s working postcards, Lawrence Weiner: A Means of Avoiding Bureaucracy offers viewers a look into the artist’s personal documentation methods that culminate in the realization of his work. 
 
The Case of the Osmanthus Flower Jelly
Artists: Ulises Carrión, Stephanie Syjuco, SHIMURAbros, Zihan Loo, and Anicka Yi
Curated by Lian Ladia
The Case of the Osmanthus Flower Jelly examines traces and clues, revealing how we collect, organize and circulate information. Unconventional forms of “knowledge distribution” from gossip, scents, censored work or personal archives become an investigation into how subjectivity and perception can shape or enrich our experiences and movement in the public realm.
 
After Notation
Artist: Marina Rosenfeld
Curated by Lisa Long
After Notation, an exhibition of recent and new work by New York-based artist Marina Rosenfeld, foregrounds the artist’s critical exploration of musical notation since the late 1990s.
 
let’s make a deal
Featured artists are Janine Antoni, Huma Bhabha, Paul Chan, Jennifer Gustavson, Jeremy Olson, Raymond Pettibon, and Seth Price
Curated by Lynn Maliszewski
let’s make a deal is a durational project that initiates correspondence between artists Huma Bhabha and Jeremy Olson. This correspondence will be conducted through monthly additions to a communal container of prolonged contemplation in a sequential relay between January and March 2017, wherein the artists will respond to each other and to prompts drawn from the Marieluise Hessel Collection.
 
los contenedores (no) son mejores vacíos
Contributions by: Tania Bruguera, Krudas Cubensi, Ted Henken, Hanny Mirin, and Chris Stover
Produced by Lola Martinez
los contenedores (no) son mejores vacíos is a research and curatorial online radio program which broadcast music that has been impacted, in content and circulation, by the political history of Cuba. Via the transmissions of playlists and interviews, modes of popular music are listened to as a means to which explore the potential futurities of Cuba amidst an uncertain political, economical, and social present.
 
Studies from the Bottom Up
Contributors: Martin Beck, Adelita Husni-Bey, Nadja Millner-Larsen, and Jennifer Wilson
Curated by Julie Niemi
Studies from the Bottom Up is a publication and exhibition exploring the context, curriculum, and communal life of Tolstoy College, a pacifist-anarchist educational community active at the University at Buffalo from 1969 to 1985.
 
 

This event was last updated on 04-06-2017

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