- Xavier Acarin
- Kathleen Ditzig
- Amber J. Esseiva
- Roxana Fabius
- Lee Foley
- Wang Jing
- Elizabeth Larison
- Robin Lynch
- Park Myers
- Natalia Zuluaga
Moves & Countermoves** : **CCS Bard Graduate Thesis Exhibitions and selected works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection
Curated by the class of 2015 M.A. candidates at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
Moves & Countermoves explores exhibition-making as a game of both establishing and breaking its own rules of engagement. Focusing on the relations between viewer, artwork, display, and institution, contemporary curatorial practice is interpreted here as a ‘slight of hand’ tactic serving to play out, and to confound competing values within the art world.
Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection are shuffled and reshuffled as curators and artists impose various selection criteria upon them. Moves & Countermoves draws from the collection to highlight a gameplay of exhibition–making strategies. Inside the museum and beyond its walls, artworks from divergent histories are placed in casual opposition to each other over a constructed platform, evoking a game board, populated with idiosyncratic pieces. Moves & Countermoves demonstrates how display affects visibility and cultural dissemination, altering the implicit rules determining what is seen and unseen within the Marieluise Hessel Collection.
The CCS Bard Class of 2015 thesis exhibitions parallel these explorations. Utilizing different selection criteria and display methods, the ten thesis exhibitions obliquely demonstrate curatorial gameplay and how it inherently shifts values within cultural economies. Enacting strategies of exhibition-making, some curatorial practices play by established rules, while others reinvent them.
In Moves & Countermoves, the exhibitions investigate what it means to operate in a field that thrives upon the making and breaking of its own rules. Game, set, and match.
Student-curated exhibitions 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.
