Rising and Sinking Again

April 1 – May 28, 2023

→ Hessel Museum of Art

Exhibition Collection

2023 Thesis Exhibitions

Exhibition Category

Collected exhibitions

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Rising and Sinking Again presents sixteen graduate exhibitions realized by the Class of 2023 master’s candidates at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard). Distinct in theme and focus, these projects are the culmination of a year and a half of research in collaboration with artists, writers, scholars, and more.

In their first week at CCS Bard, the students were asked to read critic and curator Cuauhtémoc Medina’s reflections on the meaning of “contemporary”—a word that both defines and haunts a program such as this. He argues that properly addressing the present “involves the memory of failure and a necessary infatuation with the powers of history.”

Spread throughout the Hessel Museum of Art, these sixteen exhibitions take up Medina’s statement as their collective method—considering the transmission of heritage, history, and culture; forms of spatial and perceptual mapping; and lesser-known artistic tendencies, among other topics. As various pasts roll in to meet us or recede into the distance, the MA candidates approach the contemporary as a continuous reckoning with the aftereffects and unexpected futures of such pasts. Thinking of history as a permanent process of transition, the projects of Rising and Sinking Again map idiosyncratic routes through the recurrent and liquid nature of our contemporary moment.

The CCS Bard Class of 2023 is Katherine C. M. Adams, Marina Caron, María Carri, Leo Cocar, Liv Cuniberti, Mary Kathryn Fellios, Jiwon Geum, Abel González Fernández, Kyle Herrington, Rachel Horvath-Eboh, Claire Kim, Zehra Begüm Kışla, Sidney Pettice, Ursula Pokorny, Olivia Rodrigues, and Calvin Wang.

The student-curated exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard are part of the requirements for the master of arts degree and are made possible with support from Lonti Ebers; the Marieluise Hessel Foundation; the Enterprise Foundation; the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; the CCS Bard Exhibition Circle; and by the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends. Additional support from the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard for select exhibitions.

Included exhibitions

Boundary Monuments Dissolve

Curated by Katherine C. M. Adams

Boundary Monuments Dissolve presents works that employ an aesthetics of navigation to explore the atmospheric dimension of contemporary spatial politics. Drawing on various forms of digital imaging, the featured works engage novel formations of geographic and political terrain—zones in which sight itself may become a territory for intervention, and where image becomes atmosphere.

Extended Structures

Curated by Zehra Begüm Kışla

Extended Structures surveys the work of Silent University (SU), initiated by artist Ahmet Öğüt, and unitednationsplaza, founded by artist Anton Vidokle, through a presentation of documentary and archival materials. By pairing these two distinct education projects, the exhibition intends to frame the method of “instituent practices,” or practices that seek to confront institutions not through sharp opposition but rather through the logic of extension and negotiation.

Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass

Curated by Marina Caron

From 1977 to 1985, artist Bettina Grossman—who went by her first name only—documented the flow of pedestrians on New York’s 23rd Street. She shot over 8,000 35mm color slides from her apartment balcony at the Chelsea Hotel, categorizing the images as “deliveries,” “runner,” “suspenders,” and more. The particular series The Fifth Point of the Compass / New York from A to Z, studies in random constant, fixed focus–time lapse comprises nearly 1,100 slides. Presented for the first time in its entirety, the series forms the exhibition’s centerpiece and is shown alongside related works and archival material.

Silät

Curated by María Carri

Silät presents the first publication and a selection of new textiles produced by Thañi—an organization of Indigenous women weavers of the Wichí people from the communities of Santa Victoria Este, in the province of Salta, in Argentina. Standing as a form of collective memory, Thañí’s work emphasizes the inextricable connection between Wichís and their surrounding world and highlights how this worldview frames their sovereignty and their historical claims for their territory. Thañí’s weavers speak various dialects of the Wichí language, and their texts appear in their original version and translated into Spanish and English.

An Anathema Strikes the Flesh of the Laborer

Curated by Leo Cocar

This solo exhibition of Harry Gould Harvey IV (b. 1991) takes up the industrial history of Harvey’s hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts, as well as his own personal spiritual ethos through a presentation of multimedia sculptures and an accompanying zine. An Anathema Strikes the Flesh of the Laborer also presents a social and historical account of Fall River, routed through archival material and ephemera, using the city to think through larger neglected histories of spiritually centered communities and radical politics, in dialogue with Harvey’s work

Free admission
Sarah Rapson

Curated by Liv Cuniberti

This solo exhibition of Sarah Rapson focuses on the artist’s video works as a way to consider the many facets of Rapson’s multidisciplinary practice, which incorporates painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, works on paper, audio, and video. Editing by manipulating collected art historical references is one of the mediums of Rapson’s practice—a practice that has been working and reworking, making and unmaking, doing and undoing itself since the early 1990s. While Rapson annotates existing materials, her own work undergoes the same treatment.

Shapeshifting: Or, Synonyms for Skin

Curated by Mary Kathryn Fellios

Shapeshifting: Or, Synonyms for Skin is a group exhibition that engages the deep politics of superficial play through motifs of self-adornment, looking specifically at the socialization of meaning that occurs at the physical meeting of clothing and its carrier. Processes and products of ornamentation take on, in the featured artists’ bodies of work, skins of their own.

Right to Mother

Curated by Jiwon Geum

Right to Mother features digitally inflected imaginations by three artists and one collective that expand and challenge traditional ideas around reproduction and birth.

Ya nada es como antes

Curated by Abel González Fernández

The works in Ya nada es como antes (Nothing is as it used to be) explores depictions of the Latinx experience through hypercommodified symbols like cars, the sexualized body, and adornment such as jewelry. Revolving around the figure of reggaeton star Bad Bunny, the exhibition illuminates the complex interchanges between artistic practice and pop culture in a postcolonial context.

Meet Me in the Middle of Nowhere

Curated by Kyle Herrington

Meet Me in the Middle of Nowhere foregrounds the concept of “nowheres” as spaces of queer refuge and world-building. In presenting artworks that interpret, engage, and construct these sites, this exhibition situates “nowhere” as a conduit for poignant explorations of queer possibility and futurity.

Open Secret

Curated by Rachel Horvath-Eboh

An effective secret is not necessarily fully hidden. Open Secret exhibits the research-driven work of artist Hương Ngô and architect Nina Valerie Kolowratnik and explores their investigations into secrecy as a tool to advocate for more equitable distributions of power.

Memory Work

Curated by Claire Kim

Memory Work features works by Lotus Laurie Kang, Jeneen Frei Njootli, and Esteban Ramón Pérez, shown alongside poetry by Natalie Diaz, Jasmine Gibson, and Jennif(f)er Tamayo. The exhibition explores the ways that these artists call on familial materials to forge connections with ancestral memory, land, and work, focusing on labor practices that are passed down between generations.

Gorgeous, Thrilling, Spectacle

Curated by Sidney Pettice

Gorgeous, Thrilling, Spectacle analyzes the ways in which Black self-expression is deeply connected to aspects of care, glamor, camp, congregation, and resistance to surveillance. The exhibition addresses these dynamic relationships through the act of adornment and ornamentation, highlighting the ways that the practice of decorating one’s space and body is done with profound intention, borne out of an awareness of the spectral gaze that the Black body is subject to within public space.

Fuga

Curated by Ursula Pokorny

Some artists’ homes and studios from the 20th century have been turned into spaces that the public can visit. They hold a tension between preserving the historical space and presenting the daily life lived there, in all its peculiarity. Fuga explores how the experience of such spaces can be translated into an exhibition and brings together diverse contributions from Latin American artists, designers, and educators such as Carmen Barradas, Gabriel Sierra, Probject (Manuel Raeder, Rodolfo Samperio), Proyecto Deatres, and Joaquín Torres-García.

No Jokes Allowed

Curated by Olivia Rodrigues

No Jokes Allowed examines humorlessness and uncanny comedy as a tactic in art across sculpture, painting, and performance. Featuring works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection by Rachel Harrison, Tala Madani, Lisi Raskin, Elaine Sturtevant, and Ry Rocklen alongside performance by Ikechukwu Ufomadu, Alex Forrest, and Alex Tatarsky, the project calls attention to unsteady power relationships between institution, performer, and audience.

The Hoarder of Things

Curated by Calvin Wang

A can of corn purchased repeatedly, a stack of corresponding receipts, a map of smaller maps. A dirty Q-tip, a fishbone, the plastic wrapper from a pack of cigarettes. Breadcrumbs, lint, a shrunken sweater. A button, a piece of string, a small robot.

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