Philippe Parreno and At Home/ Not At Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg

Philippe Parreno
June 26 – September 26, 2010

At Home/Not At Home
June 26 – December 19, 2010

Opening:
Saturday, June 26, 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.
www.bard.edu/ccs

This summer, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presents Philippe Parreno, the fourth exhibition in a series of retrospectives of the French artist’s work that have taken place at the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.

Curated by Maria Lind, Philippe Parreno at CCS Bard explores the artist’s work with moving images, focusing on two later pieces, June 8, 1968 (2009) and Zidane: A XXIst Century Portrait (2006), and an early work, Anywhere Out of the World (2000). June 8, 1968, which is being shown in the United States for the first time as part of this exhibition, takes us back to 1968 and the funeral train of Robert F. Kennedy. Parreno draws openly on documentary photographer Paul Fusco’s famous footage from the event as he reenacts parts of the journey in a stunningly beautiful West Coast landscape. Anywhere Out of the World is Parreno’s contribution to the intensively collaborative project No Ghost Just a Shell, which started when he and the artist Pierre Huyghe purchased a manga character, AnnLee, who was “animated” by themselves and a dozen other artists including Liam Gillick and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Zidane: A XXIst Century Portrait, made in collaboration with Douglas Gordon, is simultaneously a feature film-length portrait of a football player and a film that engages exclusively with its main protagonist without having a traditional narrative. The single-channel version of Zidane: A XXIst Century Portrait will be screened on Sunday, June 27, at noon at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, New York, and again in September on the Bard College Campus.

Concurrently, in the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard presents At Home/Not At Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg. Curated by White Columns director and CCS Bard faculty member Matthew Higgs, the exhibition includes major works by more than 100 artists including Kai Althoff, Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, David Hammons, Mary Heilmann, Elizabeth Peyton, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

At Home/Not At Home is an exhibition of works drawn from the collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg. Based in Westchester County, in the northern suburbs of New York City, the Eisenbergs have, over the past 20 years, organically and intuitively assembled one of the most idiosyncratic collections of contemporary art in the United States. At any given time, the Eisenbergs and their family live with some 500 works of art in their unprepossessing suburban home. Densely installed in almost every available space, from the children’s bedrooms to the family’s den, in a manner not unlike the 19th-century salons, theirs is a collection that is lived with and negotiated on a daily basis.

The exhibition’s title, At Home/Not At Home, is also the title of a 1982 recording by the Belgian musician Wim Mertens’s group Soft Verdict. In the context of this exhibition, the title alludes to two distinct types of social space: private space (“At Home”), and public space (“Not At Home”). This threshold between the private domain and the public realm is at the heart of the exhibition, which temporarily displaces artworks from a private suburban residential setting and restages them in the form of an exhibition in the public galleries of the Hessel Museum of Art.

Both exhibitions open on Saturday, June 26, with a reception from 1 to 5 p.m. On Sunday, June 27, CCS Bard will present a series of special programming related to the Philippe Parreno exhibition, which will include a discussion between Parreno and Simon Critchley, chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, as well as a screening of the single-channel version of Zidane: A XXIst Century Portrait. The screening of Zidane will take place at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, New York, on Sunday, June 27, at noon.

The CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College are open Wednesday through Sunday from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. All CCS Bard exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public.

Free transportation to and from the opening reception on June 26, as well as the special programming on June 27, is available on a chartered bus that leaves from New York City. For details and reservations, please call CCS Bard at 845-758-7598 or write ccs@bard.edu.

For more information, please call CCS Bard at 845.758.7598, write ccs@bard.edu, or visit www.bard.edu/ccs.

Center for Curatorial Studies and
Hessel Museum of Art
Bard College, PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000
845-758-7598
ccs@bard.edu
www.bard.edu/ccs