15 - CCS Bard

April 5 – May 25, 2025

→ Hessel Museum of Art

Exhibition Collection

2025 Graduate Student Curated Exhibitions

Exhibition Category

Collected exhibitions

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Opening Reception, Saturday, April 5, 1pm - 4pm

Limited free seating is available on a roundtrip chartered bus from New York City for the April 5th opening. Reservations are required and can be made on this by calling +1 845-758-7598 or emailing Mary Rozell at mrozell@bard.edu.

The exhibitions on display, curated by 15 M.A. candidates at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, are the culmination of two years of research, writing, and conversation. The projects span from painting to video to site-specific commissions; from exhibitions that grapple with contemporary conditions to those that mine the past; from explorations of digital dystopias to those of underrepresented archives.

Although distinct in their concerns and strategies, these curators are invested in formulating a notion of the contemporary that flows from a leaky past. The exhibitions point to an ongoing, deep engagement with histories that reverberate back and forth in time to critically reimagine the present.

The projects includes work from nearly 50 artists, an unrecordable number of conversations with staff and faculty, and the integral help of 12 art handlers without whom these exhibitions would not have been possible. The shows will be on view for 51 days, open for 340 hours.

The CCS Bard Class of 2025 is Zuhra Amini, Jungmin Cho, Hayoung Chung, Đỗ Tường Linh, Omar Jason Farah, Matthew Lawson Garrett, Cicely Haggerty, Lekha Jandhyala, Ariana Kalliga, Audrey Min, Sibia Sarangan, Andrew Suggs, Javier Villanueva, Micaela Vindman, and Charlotte Youkilis.

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.

Included exhibitions

gap gap gap /گپ گپ گپ

Curated by Zuhra Amini

How do photographs condition our perceptions of the self, family, and community? gap gap gap / گپ گپ گپ brings together three contemporary Afghan artists who refigure personal, everyday photos through the slow, careful process of needlework. Transformed by time and scale, their resulting works—situated at the intersection of photography and fiber art—monumentalize the careful, demanding process of suturing relationships that have ruptured in the aftermath of displacement.

The Edge of Belongings

Curated by Jungmin Cho

The ubiquity of consumer goods with designated lifespans, from digital devices to fast fashion and souvenirs to construction materials, carry a dual weight: physical and emotional. We form real bonds with them, yet these relationships are also part of an item’s design, encouraging repeat consumption and disposal. This exhibition—featuring Eugene Jung, boma pak, Jiajia Zhang, and Bruno Zhu—observes the unexpected intimacies we feel with common and disposable objects and how these connections reflect broader socioeconomic structures.

Sung Hwan Kim: Queer bird faces

Curated by Hayoung Chung

Queer bird faces presents films and excerpts from Sung Hwan Kim’s ongoing research into early 20th-century Korean immigration to Hawaiʻi. This multipart project illuminates the unseen faces within these histories—such as picture brides and an American instructor of Korean dance, Mary Jo Freshley, who teaches the choreography of notable Korean American dancer Halla Pai Huhm (1922–1994). An exhibition publication featuring poems by early Korean immigrants to the US and a concert by David Michael DiGregorio accompany.

dearmuthafuckindreams,

Curated by Omar Jason Farah

dearmuthafuckindreams, sits in the power and possibility of emerging artists convening with their black queer ancestors. Structured around three intergenerational conversations between photographs by Collin Alexander Riggins and Colin Robinson, words by Malcolm Peacock, Wayson Jones, and Essex Hemphill, and films by Char Jeré, Jaguar Mary X, and Marlon Riggs, the exhibition explores both the continuity and dynamism of the black queer radical tradition from the 1980s to today.

The Appearance of Distance

Curated by Matthew Lawson Garrett

The Appearance of Distance is an exhibition featuring artists whose work addresses the materiality of images and the relationship between their movement and the space through which they circulate. Works by Tiffany Sia, Kobby Adi, and Jackie Karuti respond to today’s media environment by introducing frictions, revealing how the movement of images within apparently ethereal networks leave material traces on both the surface of images and the physical landscapes through which they pass.

a clear veil

Curated by Cicely Haggerty

Through methods of blurring, folding, layering, and concealing, the artists included in a clear veil create tensions—visually, materially, and conceptually—between what is revealed and what is not about themselves and their works. Acting as both refusals and invitations, the works of Azadeh Elmizadeh, Ella Gonzales, Lotus L. Kang, and Audie Murray approach the threshold of visibility without ever becoming fully clear.

CONCRETE

Curated by Lekha Jandhyala

CONCRETE features works by Robert Barry, Jason Hirata, and Ghislaine Leung. The exhibition’s three artworks become concrete only through engagement, making awareness of the overlooked foundational to their forms. The artists incorporate the conditions, from the material to institutional and relational structures, that altogether define the experience of the show. The unseen is essential.

Mutable Cycles

Curated by Ariana Kalliga

Mutable Cycles is a group exhibition exploring the dismantling of public infrastructures in service of private profit. The featured artists turn to recent histories of financial fallout and its aftermaths—from collective struggles over home foreclosures in Cyprus since 2012–13, to the 2019 solar energy boom in Lebanon—in order to think through debt, property, and the right to public goods. Mutable Cycles features work by Joyce Joumaa, Iris Touliatou, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian.

Bảy nổi ba chìm – Seven up Three down

Curated by Đỗ Tường Linh

Bảy nổi ba chìm – Seven up Three down traces the colonial scars of displacement, resonating through the histories of Vietnam, Suriname, South Korea, and beyond. In these fractured memories, time ripples and the ghosts of the past linger, haunting our present and shaping the very essence of our existence in the world.

Intercession

Curated by Audrey Min

Intercession considers a spirit that seems to animate the digital devices that help us participate in pleasure, social life, ethics, and politics. Despite—or perhaps because of—the intimacy of this human-computer partnership, digital technology often seems to act as if by magic or prayer. Works by Lois Bielefeld, Ryan Kuo, Harris Rosenblum and Theresa Faison (for Transcendence Creative), and Viktor Timofeev play with digital interfaces and the significance of their role in analog life.

Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken

Curated by Sibia Sarangan

Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken brings together recent works by Simon Benjamin, Keli Safia Maksud, and Suneil Sanzgiri that assert lived experience and collective memory over official histories. Drawing from archives and long-term research, the featured artists subvert entrenched paradigms of temporality and identity by working across past and present, fiction and truth—or what we have come to believe is the truth.

Lovett/Codagnone: Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves

Curated by Andrew Suggs

Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves draws from the archive of artist team Lovett/Codagnone to foreground the transmission of queer lineages, specifically as impacted and shaped by HIV/AIDS. In addition to the re-creation of Lovett/Codagnone’s studio walls—featuring hundreds of pieces of ephemera related to queer histories—Closer, a Lovett/Codagnone performance from 1998, is archived and given new form by longtime collaborator Julie Tolentino.

Right now I’m not there

Curated by Micaela Vindman

Right now I’m not there focuses on the process of bringing inner aspects of oneself to the surface. Drawing from video, sculpture, and painting, the works of Narcisa Hirsch, Luiz Roque, and Rosario Zorraquin explore what happens when fragmented inner worlds are shaped through visual media and brought into our public world. The exhibition reveals the strangeness and discomfort of sharing what is most personal—and the trouble we might have with recognizing what we find.

Madeline Gins: Infinite Systems

Curated by Charlotte Youkilis

Madeline Gins: Infinite Systems presents works by Madeline Gins (1941–2014), an artist and writer whose practice tested the limits of human cognition and sensory perception. This exhibition—the first solo presentation on Gins—shifts the focus from her collaborations with her husband, Arakawa, under the moniker Arakawa+Gins, to her rarely shown independent practice. A selection of her writing and visual works from the 1960s to the 2000s—many exhibited for the first time—are displayed alongside archival materials, including ephemera, manuscripts, and photographs drawn from the Reversible Destiny Foundation.

A conversation about time takes the form of an exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art. This project features the participation of Manon de Boer, Pierre Leguillon, Raimundas Malašauskas, John Menick, Ricardo Valentim, and Javier Villanueva.

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