ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY, March 6, 2025 — On April 5, 2025, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) will present graduate thesis exhibitions organized by the Class of 2025. Collectively entitled 15, the projects point, in the students’ words, “to a deep engagement with histories that reverberate back and forth in time to critically reimagine the present.” 15 will be on view at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art through May 25, 2025.
The graduate exhibition is a core component of CCS Bard’s master’s program, which offers each student the opportunity to organize an independent project involving new commissions, original research into artists’ practices, and engagement with CCS Bard’s extensive archives and the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Past student-curated exhibitions have served as springboards for artists in the earliest stages of their careers, deep scholarship into historic movements and tendencies, and as the basis for ongoing curatorial investigations by CCS Bard graduates at other leading museums, galleries, and arts organizations around the world.
Representing individual curatorial concerns and strategies, this year’s projects range from exhibitions that explore digital dystopias, media circulation, competing histories and memory, and underrepresented artists and archives.15 unites work by nearly 50 artists, including:
Kobby Adi, Hangama Amiri, Zafar Attaii, Robert Barry, Simon Benjamin, Lois Bielefeld, Manon de Boer, Marina Christodoulidou, Lê Đình Chung, David Michael DiGregorio, Azadeh Elmizadeh, Peter Eramian, Theresa Faison, Madeline Gins, Ella Gonzales, Essex Hemphill, Jason Hirata, Narcisa Hirsch, Sung Hwan Kim, Char Jeré, Wayson Jones, Joyce Joumaa, Eugene Jung, Lotus L. Kang, Jackie Karuti, Poul Kjærholm, Ryan Kuo, Pierre Leguillon, Ghislaine Leung, Lovett/Codagnone, Keli Safia Maksud, Raimundas Malašauskas, Jaguar Mary X, John Menick, Audie Murray, Daphné Nan Le Sergent, boma pak, Malcolm Peacock, Prune Phi, Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần, Collin Riggins, Marlon Riggs, Colin Robinson, Xavier Robles de Medina, Harris Rosenblum, Luiz Roque Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Suneil Sanzgiri, Zelikha Zohra Shoja, Tiffany Sia, Viktor Timofeev, Julie Tolentino, Iris Touliatou, Ricardo Valentim, Javier Villanueva, Latifa , Jiajia Zhang, Bruno Zhu, and Rosario Zorraquín
CCS Bard Graduate Student Curatorial Statements
Full curatorial statements are linked in the exhibition titles.
gap gap gap / گپ گپ گپ
Featured artists: Hangama Amiri, Latifa Zafar Attaii, Zelikha Zohra Shoja
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
Featured artists: Eugene Jung, boma pak, Jiajia Zhang, Bruno Zhu
Curated by Jungmin Cho
Ubiquitous 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 they are intended to become obsolete, outmoded, or unwanted, 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
Featured artists: Sung Hwan Kim
Curated by Hayoung Chung
Queer bird faces presents films and excerpts from Sung Hwan Kim’s ongoing research into undocumented early 20th-century Korean immigration to Hawaiʻi. Kim’s visual re-creations—through enigmatic narratives, nonbinary figures, and idiosyncratic subtitles—invite us to envision these immigrants’ systematic erasure from history and education shaped by national boundaries. An exhibition publication featuring poems by early Korean immigrants to the U.S. and a concert by David Michael DiGregorio accompany.
Bảy nổi ba chìm – Seven up Three down
Featured artists: Lê Đình Chung, Daphné Nan Le Sergent, Prune Phi, Xavier Robles de Medina, and Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần
Curated by Đỗ Tường Linh
Bảy nổi ba chìm – Seven up Three down pays homage to Hàm Nghi (1871–1944), an Annamese (modern-day Vietnamese) emperor who became the country’s first modern artist while in exile in Algeria. The exhibition weaves together the works of Lê Đình Chung, Daphné Nan Le Sergent, Prune Phi, Xavier Robles de Medina, and Arlette Quỳnh-Anh Trần, all of whom traverse and echo hidden histories related to Hàm Nghi and his time to reinterpret, reimagine, and breathe life into both the present and the future.
dearmuthafuckindreams,
Featured artists: Essex Hemphill, Char Jeré, Wayson Jones, Malcolm Peacock, Collin Riggins, Marlon Riggs, Colin Robinson, and Jaguar Mary X
Curated by Omar Jason Farah
dearmuthafuckindreams, sits in the power and possibility of emerging artists convening with their black queer ancestors. Bringing together 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’s polyvocal and intergenerational voice speaks to the continuity and dynamism of the black queer radical tradition from the 1980s to today.
The Appearance of Distance
Featured artists: Tiffany Sia, Kobby Adi, Jackie Karuti
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
Featured artists: Azadeh Elmizadeh, Ella Gonzales, Lotus L. Kang, and Audie Murray
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
Featured artists: Robert Barry, Jason Hirata, and Ghislaine Leung
Curated by Lekha Jandhyala
Three artists, Robert Barry, Jason Hirata, and Ghislaine Leung, take CONCRETE as a site to expose the unseen and indeterminate systems that construct and condition a viewing experience.
Mutable Cycles
Featured artist: Joyce Joumaa, Iris Touliatou, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian
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.
Intercession
Featured artists: Lois Bielefeld, Ryan Kuo, Harris Rosenblum and Theresa Faison (for Transcendence Creative), and Viktor Timofeev
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
Featured artists: Simon Benjamin, Keli Safia Maksud, and Suneil Sanzgiri
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
Featured artists: Lovett/Codagnone and Julie Tolentino
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.
à
Artists: Manon de Boer, Poul Kjærholm, Pierre Leguillon, Raimundas Malašauskas, John Menick, Ricardo Valentim, and Javier Villanueva
A conversation about time takes the form of an exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art.
Right now I’m not there
Featured artists: Narcisa Hirsch, Luiz Roque, and Rosario Zorraquín
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 Zorraquín 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
Featured artists: Madeline Gins
Curated by Charlotte Youkilis
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.
Exhibition Credits
The graduate 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; Robert Soros and the Enterprise Foundation; the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; 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.
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 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.