ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY, March 4, 2022—Opening this April at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, Interference brings together fourteen new exhibitions and curatorial projects that probe the hybrid conditions, change, and adaptation that have defined life and, in turn, contemporary art and curatorial practice, since the start of the pandemic. Each exhibition is independently curated by a member of CCS Bard’s graduating class and draws upon the Marieluise Hessel Collection and CCS Bard’s Library and Archives as a launch pad to put forward original research on emerging and overlooked contemporary art and artists.
Containing a myriad of inquiries, Interference collectively explores new approaches to histories, archives, notions of embodiment, artistic production, and the gallery space itself. Featuring the work of over 40 artists, the exhibitions on view include major site-specific commissions by Rita Ponce De León, Alan Ruiz, and chukwumaa; surveys exploring how cultural histories and identity are expressed in contemporary Latinx photography and the multifaceted impacts of cryptocurrency on contemporary life and culture; and an exhibition juxtaposing the cultural and carceral histories of the Hudson Valley, among many others.
“The themes of adaptability and fluidity that bind the fourteen exhibitions can also be found in the curatorial dispositions of the graduate students, who stepped up to a challenging moment with a passion for artists and for the social and political issues shaping our lives,” said Lauren Cornell, Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum of Art and Director of the Graduate Program at CCS Bard. “In Interference, the mission of the CCS Bard graduate program—to critically question and advance the curatorial field—finds new form and purpose.”
The thesis exhibition is a core component of CCS Bard’s graduate program, which grants each graduating student the opportunity to mine the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, CCS Bard’s foundational collection of more than 3,000 objects; conduct original research into emerging artists’ practices, guided by research in CCS Bard’s extensive archives; and mount individual exhibitions and projects within the Hessel Museum of Art. Past student-curated exhibitions have served as springboards for artists in the earliest stages of their careers and as the basis for ongoing curatorial investigations by CCS Bard graduates at other leading museums, galleries, and arts organizations around the world.
CCS BARD GRADUATE STUDENT CURATORIAL STATEMENTS
Following is an overview of the fourteen exhibitions that comprise *Interference, organized by CCS Bard’s graduating class of 2022: Isabella Achenbach, Eduardo Alfonso, Angelica Arbelaez, Eugenia Braniff, Junni Chen, Sofia D’Amico, Laura Hakel, Hana Halilaj, Min Sun Jeon, May Makki, Claire Sammut, Danni Shen, Dominika Tylcz, and Guy Weltchek.
Exhibition descriptions follow below in alphabetical order by curator’s last name. Full curatorial statements are linked in the exhibition titles.
Operational Excellence
Featured artists: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Ignacio Gatica, and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer
Curated by Isabella Achenbach
In a moment when cryptocurrency has swiftly become a global phenomenon, Operational Excellence brings together newly commissioned works by Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Ignacio Gatica, and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer to consider the ways in which dematerialized currency and the ostensible abstraction of value have fundamentally changed infrastructure, ecology, and culture.
Frame (traced)
Featured artist: Alan Ruiz, Louise Lawler, and Liam Gillick
Curated by Eduardo Alfonso
A newly commissioned project by artist Alan Ruiz, Frame (traced) analyzes the formal and logistical limits of the Hessel Museum of Art’s display, architecture, and organization. Ruiz examines how boundaries are consciously and subliminally experienced and enforced by recalibrating how the edges of institutional systems are perceived.
Entre fotos y cuadernos, entre cosas y recuerdos
Featured artists: William Camargo, Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez, groana melendez, Irene Antonia Diane Reece, and Kyle Richardson
Curated by Angelica Arbelaez
Entre fotos y cuadernos, entre cosas y recuerdos features photo-based works by contemporary Latinx artists—William Camargo, Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez, groana melendez, Irene Antonia Diane Reece, and Kyle Richardson—who use vernacular photographs and personal memorabilia to reflect on the relationship between their identities and cultural histories.
Emaús
Featured artists: Armando Salas Portugal, Feliciano Béjar, Mathias Goeritz, Wilfredo Prieto and Christodoulos Panayiotou
Curated by Eugenia Braniff
Emaús explores the pervasive influence that monks and the workshops they participated had on the development of abstract art and modern architecture in Mexico in the 1960s.
Lustrous like plastic
Featured artists: Heman Chong, Christopher K. Ho, Bo Wang, and WangShui
Curated by Junni Chen
Fueled by a speculative global economy that values land primarily as a financial asset, the rate of urban redevelopment in dense urban cities has dramatically increased over the past ten years. This group exhibition brings together works by artists Heman Chong, Christopher K. Ho, Bo Wang, and WangShui to offer a meditation on how the ever-changing nature of cityscapes affect how we form collective cultural memories, anxieties, and desires.
Up River Studies: Carcerality and the American Sublime
Featured artists: Frederic Edwin Church and Zoe Scruggs
Curated by Sofia Thieu D’Amico
Bringing together prison records from the New York State Archives, oil sketches by Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church, and new landscape paintings by artist and farmer Zoe Scruggs, Up River Studies seeks to complicate the American sublime by gesturing toward what it leaves out: the violent state prison system, whose convict labor projects were foundational to the cultural development of Upstate New York. Following an “up river” movement of two systems historically central to the Hudson Valley’s development––its cultural and carceral institutions––the exhibition juxtaposes various landscape studies, visualizes absented presences through artistic interventions, and gestures to the prison system’s all-pervasive nature.
Archives of the Tympanum
Featured artists Rita Ponce de León and Raquel Rabinovich
Curated by Laura Hakel
As an intergenerational conversation about distance, migration, and artistic practice, this exhibition presents a mural of newly commissioned drawings by artist Rita Ponce de León alongside earlier paintings and an oral recording by Raquel Rabinovich, an artist who has been living in New York since 1967, having emigrated from Argentina after a military strike.
Informator
Featured artists: Doruntina Kastrati and Dardan Zhegrova
Curated by Hana Halilaj
Informator is a research-based initiative structured around the previously inaccessible archives of the National Gallery of Kosovo. Addressing gaps in art historical writing on Kosovo, as well as Eastern Europe more broadly, the exhibition urges a reconfiguration of current canonical narratives. In addition to commissioning new works, Informator invites artists Doruntina Kastrati and Dardan Zhegrova and art historians from Eastern Europe to discuss what has been omitted from selected publications on art from this region and to explore the central role of archives in conceiving and supporting historicization processes.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: audience distant relative
Featured artist: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Curated by Min Sun Jeon
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: audience distant relative presents works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), an artist and writer whose multifaceted conceptual practice has left an important legacy that has yet to be fully recognized. Presenting a range of Cha’s works—spanning mail art, video and audio works, unfinished films, Super 8 films, a multichannel installation, performance documentation, and works on paper—from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, audience distant relative highlights the ways in which Cha invokes personal and collective reminiscing that transcends time, space, and identity.
Friends of Elliptical Orbits
Featured artists: Saeed Abu-Jaber, Elias Anastas, Yousef Anastas, Mothanna Hussein, Yazan Khalili, Maha Maamoun, Ibrahim Owais, and Ala Younis
Curated by May Makki
Friends of Elliptical Orbits is an expanded presentation of Kayfa ta and Radio Alhara, two ongoing projects that offer new models for artistic production and building community. Kayfa ta is an Arabic publishing initiative, led by Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis, that adopts the form of the “how-to” manual in its publications; Radio Alhara is an online community radio platform started in Palestine by Saeed Abu-Jaber, Elias Anastas, Yousef Anastas, Mothanna Hussein, Yazan Khalili, and Ibrahim Owais. Unfolding across the Hessel Museum, a Bard College shuttle stop, and radioalhara.net, Friends of Elliptical Orbits explores how each project’s design and structure embody its values.
DISTRESS TOLERANCE
Featured artists: Bri Williams, Mona Hatoum, Brittni Ann Harvey, Rodney McMillian, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Janine Antoni, and Bryce Kroll.
Curated by Claire Sammut
DISTRESS TOLERANCE features the work of seven contemporary artists—Bri Williams, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Rodney McMillian, Brittni Ann Harvey, Mona Hatoum, and Bryce Kroll—who reflect the psychological and embodied effects of stress in their practices.
Beast, Chimera, Kin
Featured artists: Anne Chu, Jia Sung, Yi Xin Tong, and Frank WANG Yefeng
Curated by Danni Shen
Beast, Chimera, Kin explores animality as a generative framework for the formation of human subjectivity. The exhibition follows a series of works by artists Anne Chu, Jia Sung, Yi Xin Tong, and Frank WANG Yefeng, which undermine the assumptive logic of “otherness” and dehumanization via animalization, to ultimately transform “the animal” as a locus of possibility. Each builds upon transcultural, cross-species worldviews that rethink changing questions around what it means to be human with others.
whereabouts
Featured artists: Cudelice Brazelton IV, K.R.M Mooney, and Bat-Ami Rivlin
Curated by Dominika Tylcz
Presenting recent sculptures by Cudelice Brazelton IV, K.R.M Mooney, and Bat-Ami Rivlin, whereabouts investigates spatial and material strategies of signification in contemporary art that resist the production of subject matter. The exhibiting artists instead use the potentials of found materials to implicate the works’ environment as part of the sculptures themselves, redistributing their content to their direct surroundings.
Back to Back
Featured artists: Ngu Asongwed, RP Boo, and chukwumaa
Curated by Guy Weltchek
Exploring the practice of artists who straddle the fields of DJing and contemporary art production, Back to Back features newly commissioned works by Ngu Asongwed, RP Boo, and chukwumaa that each respond to the physical, formal, and discursive space within Jersey club and footwork music. The exhibition is complemented by a printed zine containing interviews with footwork and club producers in which they discuss the history of these forms, particularly focusing on the evolution of the drum programming techniques that define each genre’s signature style.
EXHIBITION CREDITS 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 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. With support from the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard for select exhibitions.
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 Hessel Museum of Art is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. by advance reservation only. To reserve and confirm your timed tickets please click here. All exhibitions and public programs are free and open to the public.
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.
Exhibitions at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies, the CCS Bard Arts Council, and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.