CCS BARD

OPENING SENTENCE presents three perspectives on the Marieluise Hessel Collection, curated by the first-year students in the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. The exhibition is comprised of three discrete chapters that coalesce into a larger narrative, based on the potentials of curating from the collection. Each room approaches different aspects of this introductory curatorial experience: the formation of meaning between object and viewer, the relationship between images and bodies, and the exposition of political agencies latent within each. Just as the opening sentence of a book functions as an invitation to the reader, the exhibition proposes openings for the viewer to navigate and engage with the collection via the selected artworks within each space.

objective encounters
The meaning of objects fluctuates between ascribed functions and uses, according to their cultural context and in relation to the onlooker. objective encounters builds its thematic from a series of ordinary dinner plates inlaid with prints of Robert Mapplethorpe’s classic flower photographs. This transfiguration, from fine art to dinnerware, points to the many ways in which objects take on or perform new meaning in relation to artistic, curatorial, or institutional intervention. Through the juxtaposition of these plates with original artworks, objective encounters explores how objects can perform as containers of subjective knowledge. Sharing characteristics with objects encountered in the everyday, the artworks featured in objective encounters humorously defy, curb, and subvert their assumed functions and meanings.

Including artworks by John Baldessari, Liz Deschenes, Tom Friedman, Mona Hatoum, Wyatt Kahn, Jim Lambie, Robert Mapplethorpe, Do-Ho Suh, Rosemarie Trockel, and Barbara Zucker.

Curated by Max Fields, Alison Karasyk, Sabrina Maltese, Thomas Patier, and Jeppe Ugelvig.

the problem with doors
the problem with doors reflects on the conventions of image production through modes of stylistic mimicry, re-photography, appropriation, and image exchange. The title is excerpted from A Poem by Eileen Myles: “That’s the problem with doors. The people inside have no patience with my fumbling.” The door functions as a framing device to emphasize the conventions of image construction, and to show how the body may trouble these conventions. The exhibition builds from Harun Farocki’s Ein Bild (1983), which guides the viewer through the production of a Playboy photoshoot over the course of four days. The work details the mechanisms involved in this construction of meaning, holding at its center an undressed woman who Farocki describes as “a sun around which a system revolves.” Still, the sun cannot be directly looked into. As in Farocki’s work, in this exhibition the body is the sun that troubles its own system, with the fumbling body as an indicator of the frame.

Including artworks by Anne Collier, Nicole Eisenman, VALIE EXPORT, Harun Farocki, Rachel Harrison, Elad Lassry, Laurel Nakadate, R. H. Quaytman, Amy Sillman, and Frances Stark.

Curated by Laura Brown, Andrew Hibbard, Selby Nimrod, Janique Vigier, and Ruiyu Xu.

inside voices

A series of handmade hooks line a gallery wall, marking out spaces available for occupancy. Hooks provide a site for the organization and accumulation of personal possessions in a transitional space between familiar interior space and the unknown exterior. Simultaneously, they offer up costumes and props for the navigation of images, roles, and identities. The artworks in inside voices replicate and/or resist the staging of identity to negotiate the multiple characters and politics of their artist-authors. The exhibition considers acts of inhabitation, borrowing, and trespassing that locate the artwork as a facilitator of exchange, able to divert the viewer or collector into relationship with the political and social identities of the artist. Here, artworks transgress this function in their strategic ambiguities or their direct provocations of neat identity.

Including artworks by Donna Dennis, Mona Hatoum, Mark Leckey, William Pope.L, Analia Saban, Haim Steinbach, A.L. Steiner, Rosemarie Trockel, and Andrea Zittel.

Curated by Levi Easterbrooks, Talia Heiman, Santiago Silva, and Amelia Wallin.