Opens in Conjunction with Promenade: Flowers and Figuration in the Marieluise Hessel Collection, Examining the Formation and Presentation of Identity
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY, February 26, 2024 — From April 6 through May 26, 2024, CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art will present Spillover, a collection of 11 curatorial projects that together form a sequence of distinct but converging artistic encounters. Their presentation represents the individual research interests and perspectives of its curators while building on a series of collective debates that have emerged over two years of study. As such, the eleven exhibition spaces and themes bleed outward, carrying ideas and concerns that have acted upon CCS Bard’s 2024 graduating class. These include explorations into the relationships between memory and displacement, artist and curator, musicians and genre, as well as the traces left behind by speech, environmental, and other ephemeral processes.
Spillover is presented concurrently with Promenade: Flowers and Figuration in the Marieluise Hessel Collection, also curated by members of CCS Bard’s graduating class. Featuring the work of 24 artists, the exhibition illuminates the ways intensely personal experiences and broader political and cultural conditions shape the self—a theme that runs throughout the Hessel Collection and offers a new lens for examining its holdings.
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 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. A culmination of CCS Bard’s graduate program, the multidisciplinary presentations in Spillover comprise new commissions, installations, auditory experiences, video works, performances, and objects drawn from the Hessel Collection.
Artists included:
Olga Balema, Lucas Blalock, Lőrinc Borsos, Nina Canell, Shahrzad Changalvaee, Julian Charrière, Natalie Conway, Mira Dayal, JJJJJerome Ellis, Michael Ezzell, Jes Fan, Aaron Feltman, Billy Frolov, Víctor Grippo, Ashley Michelle Hannah, Utsa Hazarika, Nancy Holt, Invernomuto, Katia Kameli, Lia Kang, Lolo y Lauti, Leonardo Madriz, Black Med, Nour Mobarak, Rodrigo Moraes, Olu Ogunnaike, Christelle Oyiri, Katie Paterson, Lucy Raven, Miguel Ángel Ríos, Colton Rothwell, Anri Sala, Jacob Salzer, Judd Schiffman, Robert Smithson, Zulu Souvenir, Hannah Rose Stewart, Constantin Thun, Kaari Upson, vvxxii, Florencia Werchowsky, and Guanyu Xu
CCS Bard Graduate Student Curatorial Statements Full curatorial statements are linked in the exhibition titles.
Bigger than Sound
Featured artists: Lolo y Lauti, in collaboration with Rodrigo Moraes, Florencia Werchowsky,and Zulu Souvenir;
Bard College Conservatory of Music participants: Elizabeth Chernyak (violin/viola), Esteban Ganem (percussion), Juan Diego Mora Rubio (percussion), Christopher Nelson (violin),Maya Yokanovich (clarinet), and Yuchen Zhao (violin)
Curated by Josefina Barcia
Bigger than Sound gathers the work of three contemporary artists from Argentina who tackle overlapping histories of classical and experimental music to trouble hegemonic discourses such as colonialism and nationalism. The art practices of Lolo y Lauti (b. 1980 and b. 1986, Buenos Aires) in collaboration with Rodrigo Moraes (b. 1985, Montevideo), Florencia Werchowsky (b. 1978, Neuquén), and Zulu Souvenir (b. 1974, Buenos Aires) derive from crossovers between classical music, performance, installation art, opera, sound art, experimental music, and video.
Your Presence Is a Present
Featured artists: Olu Ogunnaike and Constantin Thun
Curated by Daré Dada
Your Presence Is a Present is a two-person exhibition featuring Olu Ogunnaike and Constantin Thun. Both use sculpture and installation to envision contemporary culture as a mode of consciousness rather than as a series of static objects.
GAST
Featured artists: Ashley Michelle Hannah, Colton Rothwell, Hannah Rose Stewart, and vvxxii
Curated by Lucas Ondak
The darkness through the trees, the fog on the plain, even in the stillness something is with you: an invisible presence, a shadow of a shadow. Is it a ghost? A memory? A monster? GAST features work by Ashley Michelle Hannah, Colton Rothwell, Hannah Rose Stewart, and vvxxii that consider relationships between memory, personal and collective hauntings, concealed histories, and physical landscapes.
A Subtle Remainder
Featured artists:Lucy Raven, Nina Canell, Olga Balema, and Miguel Ángel Ríos
Curated by Clara Prat-Gay
Building on materials that are often conceived as nothingness—air, pressure, speed —A Subtle Remainder operates at the threshold of perception. Featuring a series of shadowgrams by Lucy Raven (b. 1977), a broken frame by Nina Canell (b. 1979), a sculpture by Olga Balema (b. 1984), and a video by Miguel Ángel Ríos (b. 1943), the works animate the limits of the invisible and the unresolved. In each one, the remainder is posed as a warning—the trace of uncontainable phenomena striving to materialize unreadable threats.
Glot
Featured artists: Shahrzad Changalvaee, JJJJJerome Ellis, Nour Mobarak, and Anri Sala
Curated by Sophie Rose
In a moment when verbal communication saturates our digital platforms, public forums, and many workplaces, Glot explores the politics of the voice beyond intelligible or self-possessed speech. The exhibition features the work of JJJJJerome Ellis, Nour Mobarak, and Anri Sala, with a significant new commission from Shahrzad Changalvaee.
A song within a song within a song
Featured artists: Christelle Oyiri and Katia Kameli
Listening space: Black Med, coordinated by Invernomuto
Curated by Aïda Sidhoum
A song within a song within a song maps francophone popular music genres such as zouk, coupé-décalé, raï, French hip-hop, and R&B, tracing their layered contexts from the 1990s up to today. Through art, music, and written materials, the exhibition brings forward the dispersed geographies and social histories residing with the resonances of francophone popular songs.
Weight of Mind
Featured artists: Kaari Upson, Jes Fan,and Lucas Blalock
Curated by Thalia Stefaniuk
Featuring sculpture and photography, Weight of Mind presents the works of three artists—Kaari Upson, Jes Fan, and Lucas Blalock—that explore how memory is given form. Through diverse modes of translation and varied processes, the artists provide space to examine past experiences and sensations that otherwise would be fleeting as they intervene upon the impressions memory leaves behind. In an accompanying public program on April 7th from 3-6, an artist-curated short film festival at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, NY, further explores how translations across mediums and context influence an artist’s engagement with their practice.
I’m not alien, I’m discontent
Featured artists: Utsa Hazarika, Leonardo Madriz,and Guanyu Xu
Curated by Pallavi Surana
In a moment where the mass movement of people—both forced and voluntary—has become a notable constant, I’m not alien, I’m discontent brings together works by Utsa Hazarika, Leonardo Madriz, and Guanyu Xu that explore domestic spaces to complicate notions of home and belonging. The works employ fragmentation and layering to show the composite ways in which the idea of home is articulated, even through multiple dislocations.
NARNIA IS A LIE
Featured artist: Lőrinc Borsos
Curated by Lili Rebeka Toth
NARNIA IS A LIE is the first institutional presentation in the U.S. by Lőrinc Borsos—a Hungarian duo whose work has gained considerable influence in Central Europe since their inception 15 years ago. A labyrinthine, atmospheric installation of multimedia sculptures overlaid with sound, kinetic, and light elements, NARNIA IS A LIE presents recent work that builds on the duo’s complex, private mythology—a mythology in dialogue with digital media, electronic music culture, video game aesthetics, and Christian iconography and eschatology.
Carboniferous Love
Featured artists: Julian Charrière, Mira Dayal, Víctor Grippo, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Katie Paterson
Curated by Clara von Turkovich
Named for the rich coal stores produced over 300 million years ago, when Earth was covered with swamp forests, Carboniferous Love presents artworks that recalibrate perceptions of time and space. Gathering the works of Julian Charrière, Mira Dayal, Víctor Grippo, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, and Katie Paterson, the exhibition engages the physicality of sculpture and time-based media, seeking to tie the present to the material history of our planet.
Biomes
Featured artists: Natalie Conway, Michael Ezzell, Aaron Feltman, Billy Frolov, Lia Kang, Jacob Salzer, and Judd Schiffman
Curated by Luke Whittaker
Biomes explores the complex dynamics between artists, the economy of art, and the work they no longer own. The exhibition emerged from conversations between the artists and curator, examining how artistic practices are sustained and how artists advocate for their work without institutional support, including the complications of selling work outside the traditional gallery system. Biomes considers the variety of iterations, availability, and affordability of art and how works, now outside the artist’s domain, converse with the domestic sphere, from furniture to wallpaper and kitchen countertops to toilets. How does art, residing in a domestic space, allude to larger narratives of artistic practice, production, and visibility?
Also on view:
Promenade: Flowers and Figuration in the Marieluise Hessel Collection
Curated by Lucas Ondak and Luke Whittaker
The word “promenade” describes a public stroll whereby one performs and presents themselves. It also describes a place where said strolling is done. Designed to mimic the symmetrical architecture of large, landscaped gardens, Promenade: Flowers and Figuration in the Marieluise Hessel Collection brings together works in which the human figure appears in multiple ways, often layered with flowers or foliage. The exhibition explores the ways intensely personal experiences and broader political and cultural conditions shape the self—a theme that runs throughout the Hessel Collection. Featured artists include:
Huma Bhabha, Paul Chan, Kudzanai Chiurai, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Samuel Fosso, Nan Goldin, Rachel Harrison, Camille Henrot, Robert Kushner, Deana Lawson, Nikki S. Lee, Robert Mapplethorpe, Otobong Nkanga, Zohra Opoku, Gabriel Orozco, Gordon Parks, Malick Sidibé, Sable Elyse Smith, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Rosemarie Trockel Lina Iris Viktor, Kehinde Wiley Joe Zucker
Exhibition Credits
The graduate student-curated exhibitions and projects at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, are part of the requirements for the master of arts degree and are made possible with support from Lonti Ebers; the Enterprise Foundation; the Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Wortham Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.
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.